Missed It by That Much...

Since we began reading about him in 2001, Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett has had an uneasy friendship with drifter/mountain man/federal fugitive Nate Romanowski. Nate has saved Joe's life and his family's lives more than once, and helped Joe close cases too big to handle alone. And Joe has helped Nate as well, especially by remaining silent on his whereabouts when questioned by federal law enforcement agents who want to talk to, arrest or eliminate Nate -- or all of the above.

As 2011's Cold Wind ended, Nate received a message that meant his past was coming back, and not necessarily to haunt him. Force of Nature opens as that past tracks Nate down and makes the first move in a deadly game. He knows that anyone he calls on for help is at risk, so he tries to flee on his own. But his enemies may already know about his friends, including Joe Pickett. They may already be part of the game, no matter how hard Nate tries to prevent them from becoming pawns.

Force is a rebound of sorts for Box, whose last two or three Joe Pickett novels have been hamstrung by lazy plotting, a few too many ridiculous characters and not enough trimming of repetitious story elements. Box has never lost his easy-going narrative style, and that lends an interesting layer to Nate's anything-but-easygoing hazards. But he does try too hard in some places, especially in working the falconry metaphors, which leads to quite a bit more expository conversation than Joe Pickett novels usually feature. And the whole Special Forces/global terrorism angle of Nate's history is really too far afield for Joe's usual arena of work; it feels shoehorned in and does not fit well.

Even so, Force betters the silly Below Zero by a large margin and may represent Box back in a groove -- now that he has Nate's back story out of the way, he might be able to reconnect with Joe and his family.

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Second-generation bestseller author Jesse Kellerman -- son of novelists Jonathan and Faye -- has fallen into a weird odd/even pattern in his books. His first and third books, Sunstroke and The Genius, were interesting novels that didn't let their mainstream audience targeting and style keep them from developing plots, characterizations and ideas worth thinking about. Genius especially stood out in this way. But his second and fourth novels, Trouble and The Executor, were filled with unlikeable characters following ugly or banal storylines that offered no payoff for investing time in them. Trouble, in fact, is a blend of grotesque and banal that produces the mental equivalent of a retching yawn.

Potboiler starts making a good case that Kellerman's odd-even pattern continues. Never-was literature professor Arthur Pfefferkorn had a friend 20 years ago -- Bill -- who became a best-selling author writing high-energy, low-intellect airport novel thrillers. Now his friend has been declared dead six months after being lost at sea, and Arthur attends his funeral. There, he reconnects with Carlotta, Bill's widow and his first love. They rekindle a relationship, but Arthur swipes Bill's unpublished manuscript and reworks it as his own, giving him the success as an author he always felt he deserved but could never attain.

Then it starts to get weird. Bill was involved in some matters that could easily get literature professors and would-be Serious Writers killed, and the manuscript theft sets them in motion. Arthur will have to learn a lot about his character and his limits if he wants to keep himself and the people he loves safe.

Kellerman, a skilled writer, has a great handle on the glaring weaknesses of the adventure thriller novel, called a "potboiler" because writers in the pulp era would turn in manuscripts they knew were knock-off hackery for a simple reason: To keep food on the table and the pot boiling. He uses that to give Arthur several wry observations on the genre and its work, but also lets us snicker at Arthur because he's jealous of the success he hates. He manages to keep things going even when Potboiler crosses the line from comedy to broad, Strangelovian satire, holding his narrative thread together and keeping his focus in spite of the sheer tornado of absurdity surrounding Arthur.

But it's not an unqualified success. After offering a comic opener and bitingly satirical third act, Kellerman seems to want to finish off with a flourish of properly literary pathos and strange imagery that don't mesh with the rest of the work. It's as though he tacked one of his even-numbered endings onto one of his stronger odd-numbered novels.

Of course if this kind of combination is a habit, it may result in some much better even-numbered offerings -- something that may prompt us to, in one fluid motion, cross our fingers and hope comes to pass.