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.”

REVIEW OF BOOK OPENING

I have decided from now on that I will only review the first book in a series, so my apologizes to C. J. Box for picking on Dark Sky. Since this is the twenty-first Joe Pickett novel there is already a loyal base of readers who are anxious to go on their next Joe Pickett adventure, so having a hook at the beginning may not be seen as important.

Still, someone who had no idea who Joe Pickett is may find themselves picking this book up at a bookstore and reading the first page. 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.

I included the first three paragraphs and two additional lines of dialogue so that you could get a feel for the world that C. J. Box has created. This book is categorized as a Mystery, Thriller, and Suspense, but I suspect most of the readers will be fans of cowboys and ranchers. The opening does a great job of setting the tone for the book, but because I read the book blurb I know there is an exciting story coming, it’s just a shame that it isn’t hinted at on the first page.

The multi-million dollar jet far up in the sky is a hint at the story to come, but wouldn’t it have been more exciting if the book started with the plane on the runway and the author began the book with the out of place contrast between the rich man who just landed and rugged countryside and men that were there to greet him. It would be a great opportunity to use some internal and external dialogue to reveal their mutual dislike of each other.

The blurb reveals that Joe Picket, a Wyoming game warden, must accompany a Silicon Valley CEO on a hunting trip but soon learns that he himself may be the hunted.

The jacket blurb is far more intriguing than this opening page. There is nothing in the book opening that grabs me or hooks my attention. I know a little about the rugged characters and the landscape, and I see the kind of lackluster dialogue one would expect from an introverted cowboy who isn’t particularly chatty.

So as someone who knows nothing about the Joe Picket novels, if I picked this book up and read the first page, I would set it back on the shelf. If I had read the blurb, my attention would be peaked, and I’d give the book a few more page turns.

The full description on Amazon is even better, but I felt it gave away so much of the book that predicting the ending may be fairly easy, especially since authors don’t tend to kill off their main protagonist in the twenty-first novel.

I’m giving this a two and a half stars out of five, the half of star because this book is the twenty-first in the series. I should also note there is some really nice writing just a couple more paragraphs down, but again, this is not a review of the book (Which has a near-perfect rating on Amazon (SEE HERE) but only on the book opening.

NOTE: There is a typo on the first page, and I have included it here because that is how it was printed.

John Reinier

The post Dark Sky (A Joe Pickett Novel Book 21) appeared first on Book Opening.

WHEN THE SHOE DROPPED INTO her lap, the foot was still in it.

She flung it into the air with a shriek. The bloodied mass hung in weightless suspension before being sucked out of the massive hole in the side of the aircraft. On the floor next to her seat, a flight attendant crawled up the aisle screaming for the passengers to put their oxygen masks on.

REVIEW OF BOOK OPENING

The opening line of this novel had me 100%. It’s short, concise, and utterly terrifying, or is it? Perhaps someone just tossed their feet (or, in this case, a single foot) into someone’s lap? Was it a lover, or a child putting a foot in a mother’s lap? My horror drops slightly as I ponder non-horrifying things until I get to the next line. It could be a young girl or a woman, I still don’t know, but the foot wasn’t attached to any person.

Such a great visual on the next line, with it being suspended weightlessly in the air for a moment before it was sucked out of the massive hole in the side of the aircraft. WOW… all of that in three lines! Imagine what she can do in the space of an entire novel.

In the first four lines opening this book, I already have a series of questions. 1) Who is this poor girl? 2) Who lost their foot? 3) How did this person get separated from their foot. 4) What caused the hole in the plane 5) Is the plane going to crash?

This is one of the best openings on a book that was not even on my radar before reading the first page. I immediately added it to my have to read soon pile.

5/5 Top Notch

John Reinier

Read It On Amazon

The post Falling – T.J. Newman appeared first on Book Opening.