C.J. Box

Bestselling novelist C.J. Box should feel right at home during his visit to Murder by the Book. “I think this will be my 19th time at Murder by the Book,” says Box, who has appeared at the mystery bookstore with the release of each of his titles over his 20-plus-year career. During this visit, the author is discussing and signing Endangered, the latest in his Joe Pickett mystery series. Endangered starts with a short phone call to Pickett, a Wyoming game warden. Pickett’s adopted daughter April, who’s been missing for several months, has been found by the side of a road, he’s told. She’s been beaten nearly to death and dumped into a ditch, no doubt thought to be dead. Pickett quickly suspects Dallas Cates, April’s former boyfriend, is responsible for her injuries. There’s no real evidence against him, but Pickett knows Cates is involved and he sets out to prove it.

The father of three daughters, Box drew on his own experiences as a parent for Endangered. “For every parent, a phone call that your child has been hurt or is dead is a nightmare,” Box says. “It’s easy to imagine the anger, the hurt that a father would feel in a situation like this.”

As with the other installments in the Joe Pickett series, Endangered features a mystery (here it’s the attack on April) and a parallel environmental story line (here it’s the illegal killing of game birds). “I don’t want to write agenda books. At the same time, I want to give people more than just a whodunit. I want to give people a bigger [environmental] story; whether it’s about wind power or illegal dumping, there’s always more than just the mystery.”

Box is careful to present both sides of every story. “I don’t think anyone is all bad or all good. I try to write characters who are a mixture of both. I’ve been able to do that with every book…well, every book but one.” That one exception was Breaking Point, based on a couple who found themselves in a David-and-Goliath fight with the Environmental Protection Agency. (The real-life case went to the Supreme Court — the EPA lost in a 9-0 ruling.) “One reason I didn’t show the EPA side was the EPA wouldn’t talk to me. There wasn’t any situation that I could imagine that would make sense for the EPA to do what it did, so I wasn’t able to show both sides in that book.”

Tue., March 17, 6:30 p.m., 2015