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The main problem with THREE-INCH TEETH, the 24th novel by C. J. Box featuring Montana game warden Joe Pickett, is a serious one. Once you start reading, the suspense and momentum of the events sweep you up and you cannot put the book down until the very last page. This becomes a real problem if there are other things in your life besides this book. However, the intensity of the story and the high stakes of the murders and potential murders make it all worthwhile.
A grizzly bear is marauding through the mountains near Joe's Twelve Sleep County, an area far from the usual habitat of these creatures. A young man fishing is crushed and killed and the Predator Attack Team that goes after the bear does not fare well. Besides hunting the bear, Joe Pickett and his team are harassed by two women who want the bear spared and spring the traps set for it.
Meanwhile, a violent criminal we have met in earlier books, Dallas Cates, is freed from prison. In a bureaucratic mistake, Joe, who may be in danger from Dallas, isn't informed of his release. Dallas wants revenge on the people he believes ruined his life by killing his family and putting him in prison. His family was comprised of sadistic killers without redeeming qualities, and Dallas has led a life of crime, but he blames others. On his hit-list are Joe and his friend Nate Romanowski, Nate's wife Liv, the judge and the prosecutor who put him away. When Dallas learns about the grizzly bear, he devises a devilish plan to kill these people but make the world think that they were killed by the bear.
Dallas is joined by several nefarious folks. One is another one of Joe's enemies, another is a woman who fell in love with him while he was in prison, and another is his ex-cellmate who is a genius at creating weird and deadly inventions.
C. J. Box does not play it safe in his novels. No character is above being harmed, and even those we have come to know from previous works may not make it. The young man who is killed at the start is the boyfriend of Joe's daughter Sheridan, and he was about to propose to her. And his is not the only death of a familiar person.
Joe Pickett gets most of the bad guys in the end, but plenty of events occur that need to be further explored in the next novel of this series. And we the readers must just be patient. We will surely lose another full day of our future lives reading that book sometime down the road.
§ Anne Corey is a writer, poet, teacher and botanical artist in New York's Hudson Valley.
Reviewed by Anne Corey, February 2024
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