Joe Pickett Series: C.J. Box Complete Reading Order

C.J. Box has been writing about Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett since 2001, and the series has become one of the most consistently excellent long-running rural crime series in American fiction. Joe is not a detective or a cop — he patrols public land, enforces hunting and fishing regulations, and stumbles repeatedly into crimes far beyond his jurisdiction. His boss doesn’t like him. His budget is inadequate. He has a wife, Marybeth, who is often sharper than he is, and daughters who keep ending up in danger.

Why a game warden?

The choice of protagonist is the series’ great creative decision. A game warden in Wyoming operates across vast, lightly policed country — hunting camps, ranching operations, remote cabins, reservation borderlands. This gives Box access to a world most crime fiction never reaches: poaching, oil and gas drilling disputes, trophy hunting, the intersection of federal land management and local power. Joe’s job puts him on public land, which is contested terrain in the American West, and the politics of that contestation — who controls it, who profits from it — run through the whole series.

Reading order

The Joe Pickett series should be read in publication order. Joe’s family — Marybeth, daughters Sheridan, Lucy, and foster daughter April — grow up across the series. Relationships deepen, careers change, and things happen to these people that carry permanent weight. Starting out of order means missing who these characters have become.

Open Season (2001) — Joe discovers a dead federal agent in the mountains, and a secret that the local power structure wants buried. The best introduction: Joe is established quickly, the Wyoming landscape is beautifully rendered, and the plot concerns endangered species politics that remains relevant.

Savage Run (2002) — Environmental extremists, cattle ranchers, and a political figure who may or may not want Joe dead. Box starts introducing the recurring villain structure that defines the series at its best.

Winterkill (2003) — A federal agent and a militia leader’s compound and a Wyoming winter. The series finds its stride here.

Full Joe Pickett reading order →

Nate Romanowski — the series’ best character

Running alongside Joe is Nate Romanowski, a former Special Forces operator who now lives off the grid and handles falconry. Nate is a genuinely dangerous man who has decided to follow a personal code rather than a legal one, and his friendship with Joe is the series’ most interesting relationship. Nate is not always in every book, but when he appears, the stakes and the atmosphere shift noticeably.

The Cassie Dewell spinoff

C.J. Box also writes the Cassie Dewell series, a spinoff following a Montana deputy. It shares Box’s Wyoming/Big Sky setting but is darker and more thriller-oriented than the Pickett books. The Netflix series Big Sky is based on the Cassie Dewell novels.

The two series are independent — you do not need to have read Pickett to read Cassie Dewell, and vice versa. Cassie appears in some Pickett books as a crossover, but these appearances work as standalone encounters.

Frequently asked questions

How long is the series? 25 novels as of 2025, with Box publishing roughly one a year. The series shows no signs of ending.

Is the quality consistent? Yes, unusually so. Box doesn’t have the long mid-series dip that affects many long-running series. The books from 10-20 are as good as the early ones.

Is there a television adaptation? Box’s Big Sky (Cassie Dewell series) became a long-running ABC series. Joe Pickett has not been adapted for major television, though there is an independent streamed series.

Where to start if you’re reading Wyoming crime generally? Start Joe Pickett at Open Season and Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire at The Cold Dish. Both series are set in Wyoming, but they occupy very different corners of it and have a completely different feel — Pickett is faster-paced, Longmire is more meditative.