Name: Dark Sky
Rating: 2.5 (2 reviews)

Opening Line

Wyoming game warden Joe Picket stood on the edge of the tarmac with his hands thrust into the pockets of his parka and his gray Stetson clamped on tight against the cold wind.

My take:

★★★★★ ★★★★★ 2.5

This opening line sets the scene clearly, but there is no real hook. We meet Joe Pickett, learn what he is wearing, and get a sense of the cold, windy setting, but nothing in the sentence creates curiosity or tension. Since this is the twenty-first Joe Pickett novel, longtime readers may not need much of a hook to keep going, but judged strictly as an opening line, it feels functional rather than compelling.

Note: I found this book because it was on Stephen King’s personal recommendation list of books he has recently enjoyed, which was high praise indeed.

The Opening Paragraph:

Wyoming game warden Joe Picket stood on the edge of the tarmac with his hands thrust into the pockets of his parka and his gray Stetson clamped on tight against the cold wind. It was a week until his birthday and his leg hurt and the brisk chill made him feel all of his fifty-one years on the planet.

My take:

★★★★★ ★★★★★ 2.5

The paragraph feels like an extension of the first line, adding a little more character than the opening line. We learn Joe is nearing his fifty-second birthday, his leg hurts, and the cold is making him feel his age. That gives him some personality and physical presence, but the paragraph still doesn’t create much tension or curiosity. So far, it feels more like orientation than an invitation to keep reading.

The Opening Page:

Wyoming game warden Joe Picket stood on the edge of the tarmac with his hands thrust into the pockets of his parka and his gray Stetson clamped on tight against the cold wind. It was a week until his birthday and his leg hurt and the brisk chill made him feel all of his fifty-one years on the planet.

His first glimpse of the $65 million Gulfstream G650ER private jet was of a gleaming white speck high above the rounded, snowcapped peaks of the Bighorn Mountains to the west.

It was a cloudless mid-October morning, but it had snowed an inch during the night and the ten-mile-an-hour breeze cleared the concrete of the runway, rolling thin smoky waves of flakes across the pavement of the Saddlestring Municipal Airport. The timbered mountains had received three to five inches that would likely melt away in the high-altitude sun, but the treeless summits looked like the white crowns of so many bald eagles standing shoulder to shoulder against the clear blue sky.

“Cold this morning,” Brock Boedecker said.

“Yup.”

My Take:

★★★★★ ★★★★★ 3.0

What works:
The prose is polished and controlled. The author clearly knows how to paint a setting. The snow moving across the runway and the mountain imagery are vivid. More importantly, the arriving private jet finally introduces an element of contrast and curiosity. A $65 million aircraft feels conspicuously out of place against the quiet Wyoming setting, and it raises the first real question of the opening: who is arriving, and why?

What doesn’t:
The page spends considerable space establishing the weather and landscape, yet the physical staging is surprisingly unclear. When Brock Boedecker suddenly speaks, I initially wondered who he was and where he had come from. The following paragraph explains him, but until that moment I had assumed Joe was standing alone.

Did it hook me?
Somewhat. The arrival of the private jet feels important, and it is the first element that suggests the story may be about to begin. The opening page does not yet reveal why, though, and I still have very little sense of what the story itself will be about.

Would I Keep Reading?
Maybe. I feel like I already know Joe Pickett just from the description. He seems like a salt-of-the-earth kind of man. I would, and did, turn the page to find out who the owner of the second voice was and to clear up my confusion. Ultimately, the main reason to keep reading is wanting to know who is on that expensive plane and what kind of trouble they might bring to this peaceful small town.

If I had read the blurb, my attention would be piqued, and I’d give the book a few more page turns.

John Reinier