At the beginning of C.J. Box’s rollicking twenty-fourth Joe Pickett novel, Clay Hutmacher Jr. is mauled to death by a grizzly bear. Joe—the Wyoming game warden who habitually stumbles into trouble more dangerous than it first appears—​is assigned to assist the Predator Attack Team in hunting the grizzly down, despite the protestations of Mama Bear activists. For Joe, this attack has a personal connection. Clay Jr. was potentially going to be his son-in-law, assuming the young man’s relationship with Joe’s daughter Sheridan maintained its course.

This might be enough fuel for an early Box thriller, but “Three-Inch Teeth” is all about rewarding longtime readers, and is firmly knotted in long tendrils of continuity. Familiar series antagonist Dalles Cates has just been released from prison, and wants revenge on those who helped lock him away destroyed his family. Realising he can use the emergence of the killer grizzly as cover for a murderous spree of his own, he implements an ingenious method of butchering his enemies, all of which are attributed to the bear. Box – who is never afraid of killing a character – maximises plenty of tension and suspense as Cates closes in on Joe and his family and allies.

I loved this. I ripped through it in a few early-morning reading sessions. Box’s prose is honed, and the pages fly. There is a Big Dramatic Moment that truly floored me, and left me absolutely gutted, but also immediately felt rather too much like ‘fridging’—​a trope coined by Gail Simone involving female characters facing disproportionate harm or assault as a plot devices to motivate male characters​. But we’ll see how things eventuate. “Three-Inch Teeth” sets things up for one humdinger of a twenty-fifth entry in one of the most consistently entertaining thriller series being published today.