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Joe Pickett's friend Nate Romanowski has a checkered past and in the eyes of most of the federal law enforcement people he meets, he ought to be behind bars. But recent events mean Nate has a pardon -- from the government at least -- and he's headed back to the Wyoming county Joe patrols as a state game warden.

But Joe has problems of his own. His foster daughter April ran off with rodeo cowboy Dallas Cates and now Cates is back but April isn't. The Cates family is close-mouthed to say the least and they don't get any more communicative when April is found along a roadside, beaten into a coma and near death. The least Joe wants to settle for is for Dallas falling down some stairs after being arrested, but there's no evidence and he's having little luck finding any. Nate will be little help, as someone close to him has gone missing and he needs to know not only where she is, but whether or not her disappearance means he needs to be on the run again.

And there's a side plot involving sage grouse.

Endangered is the 15th Joe Pickett novel from C.J. Box, and he is fully comfortable with his descriptions of the rugged Wyoming countryside and its residents. The Cates family bears more than a little resemblance to the Bennett clan of Justified season 2, but insular backwoods families aren't uncommon in thrillers. There's probably one or two many coincidences between Box's different plotlines, but since we have a book in front of us it's not like we're unaware we're following a made-up story. He skips some of the more improbable Nate-centered stuff from Force of Nature, too, which is a wise choice.

Box is in a sweet spot of his series in that he's found a good groove that hasn't yet become a rut. By allowing the family concerns Joe faces to move along as he and his wife and daughters age, he can change the scenery enough to make the mysteries and problems Joe faces stay interesting over time.

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 One of the knocks on the practice of "profiling" terrorists is that eventually it won't work, as the terrorist organizations find recruits who don't fit the profile -- and may even look more like the people down the block than the fanatical faces on the evening news.

Brad Taylor gives a group of such sleeper agents the name "The Lost Boys" because of the history he creates for them and lets the extralegal Task Force gain a hint of them and their plans. Pike Logan and his team have to track their few known leads to even get on the Lost Boys' trail, let alone try to catch up or know where it will end up. And once on that trail, the one thing they do find is that time is not their friend in The Insider Threat.

Former Special Forces soldier Taylor has given his Pike Logan series a healthy dose of realism when it comes to combat and the stress it brings, especially when the combatants face each other from the shadows of espionage operations and not across an open battlefield. He continues to do that in this latest story, showing Pike and his team members often on the frayed edge of stress overload fighting both enemies and the clock. Threat is more scattershot than some earlier books in the series, with what seems like a wrinkle too many and a couple of unneeded cast members to follow and mine for motives and information.

The action scenes still pop, though, and the tension the characters face feels real even if Taylor's prose style is still pretty meat-and-potatoes and he's still on the learning curve of figuring out how to show his readers things instead of telling them. Pike and his team-mate Jennifer are continuing to develop in their own character arcs and two newer cast-mates, the Mossad agents Aaron and Shoshana, are given more screen time to find their own best fit in the narrative. The Pike Logan series remains an important and enjoyable for the espionage thriller fan.

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Victor the assassin has survived because he gives free rein to two qualities most people try to moderate: paranoia and ruthlessness. Whether someone is really after him or not, it won't matter if they're rendered unable to do anything about it, so Victor is generally pretty quick to go about rendering in haste and repenting at leisure, if at all.

Unfortunately, in The Darkest Day, the threat develops before Victor can be aware of it and he barely scrapes out of a trap laid by Raven, another assassin as cunning and ruthless as he is. In order to neutralize this latest threat, Victor must think like his opponent to find the trail -- which may be a tougher job than he realized, because Raven is a woman.

Over the course of four previous works with Victor, Tom Wood has tried to vary his formula enough to keep readers interested in a paranoid sociopath who mission in life is to end the lives of others for money, and he's generally been successful. Victor has just enough tattered remnants of a moral code to offer a reader a foothold in his narrative, and when he's paired with a sympathetic character that narrative amounts to more than a plain, "Will Victor kill his enemies before his enemies kill Victor?" Wood has hit enough success with the series that the answer to that is an obvious, "Yes," so why would you read that story? 

Day relies heavily on a long chase through blacked-out Manhattan as Victor reluctantly partners with Raven to get out of a trap set for both of them -- her employers are ready to remove her from the board too, as she has outlived her usefulness to them. It's more than a little repetitive and could lose an episode here and there, and the "sympathetic character" role doesn't much fit the story's other ruthless assassin, Raven. Wood also seems to be trying a little too hard to restore the "anti-" part of Victor's role as anti-hero and thus Day offers some off-putting moments and a post-ending coda that just feels mean. It's the weakest of the series, but Wood has a good track record and subsequent volumes may have better story choices than this one does.