Critiques en avant-première

Over fourteen Joe Pickett novels and four stand-alone books, C.J. Box has been consistently hailed for his brilliant storytelling and his extraordinary skills at creating character, suspense, and a deep sense of place. All of those strengths can be found in the ten riveting stories – three of them written especially for this book and never before published -- that make up SHOTS FIRED. In “One-Car Bridge,” one of four Joe Pickett stories, Pickett goes up against a “just plain mean” landowner, with disastrous consequences, and in “Shots Fired,” his investigation into the radio call of the title nearly ends up being the last thing he ever does. In “Pirates of Yellowstone,” two Eastern Europeans, strangers in a strange land, hear that American tough guys can be ruthless, but it’s not till they try strong-arming one that they discover the real truth of the statement; and in “Le Sauvage Noble,” the stranger is Jimmy Two Bulls, a Lakota who takes a job in the Wild West Show at Disneyland Paris and finds its perks to be pleasant – good wages, decent food, and French woman who find his “noble savage” act to be pretty exotic – that is, until he meets Sophie. Then he finds out what “savage” really means. Together, these ten stories only prove again what BookPage said about the Pickett novels: “I would say that he is at the top of his form, but the top just keeps moving ever upward.”