"Shots Fired" by C.J. Box (Head of Zeus, 2014)

• "One-Car Bridge" - The local landowner Dietrich (a nasty guy) wants to open a hunting ranch. The local policeman, Joe, gives the news to Dietrich's manager that the proposal's been rejected. Dietrich will sack the manager - a shame because his shy son likes the area. Joe likes the manager and tries to reason with Dietrich. The manager's son gives Dietrich a lift. There's an accident and Dietrich dies. Joe doesn't think it's an accident but doesn't mind. There's a little colourful language - "The sleek Piaggio Avanti II twin-engine turboprop sliced out of the wide blue sky and touched down on the single runway with the grace of a raptor snagging a fish." The dialog's good. The weak plot is weakly presented.
• "Pirates of Yellowstone" - Vladdie and Eddie had arrived from Prague expecting to work in Yellowstone. But there's no work. They blackmail a guy for $2,000 using language they've heard in gangster movies. He shoots Eddie and Vladdie kills him. Vladdie feels that he's American now.
• "The End of Jim and Ezra" - It's 1835. Jim and Ezra have been snowbound for 3 months up a mountain. They've collected loads of beaver pelts. Jim can't stand Ezra so he walks out. He encounters Indians and returns tired and wounded, dying a few minutes after he gets back to the hut.
• "The Master Falconer" - Nate is friends with a women on a reservation. An old college acquaintance, an Arab, has become a multibillionnaire, funding fundamental mosques, etc. He wants to buy wild falcons from Nate as he's done before. Nate refuses - a matter of principle. The Arab's men buy the local police and put pressure on Nate's women. An Arab bodyguard is gratuitously violent. Nate sells the birds to the Arab but puts the bodyguard through an agonising Indian ordeal. Actually, the birds in the crate he delivered were chickens, not falcons. I can't help thinking that the rich Arab will have the last laugh.
  Again, the dialog's good. The plot's more intricate too, but of course the Arabs would have wondered about the absence of the bodyguard, and what if the chickens had clucked?
• "Every day is a good day on the river" - The start's good - "The guide, Randall 'Call Me Duke' Connor, pushed them off from the sandy launch below the bridge into the river and within seconds the muscular dark flow of the current gripped the flat-bottomed McKenzie boat and spun it like a cigarette butt in a flushed toilet". Tim (poor at school, but now a rich geek with a cute wife) got Jack (in Tim's class but not really a friend) to book the trip so he could murder Randall who's having an affair with his wife. Tim kills Randall in a way that risks his own life. Not a good plot.
• "Pronghorns of the Third Reich" - How-to-write books warn against sentences like "Parker glanced at his reflection in a mirror in the stairwell. Six-foot-two, steel-gray hair, cold-blue eyes, and a jawline that was starting to sag". Lawyer Parker is grabbed by ranch-hands Clint and Juan while still in his pyjamas. They go off in a pickup through a whiteout. Clint thinks his grandpa was swindled by his ex-business partner, Fritz Engler, who subsequently became rich. Parker had represented the Engler Estate when Parker tried to claim money. Parker lost. Now he wants to take the law into his own hands, stealing Engler's valuable book collection. Parker, for some reason, has the keys to Engler's mansion. Parker, fearing for his life, tries to turn Juan against Clint. In the mansion Parker finds a photo which might be evidence enough for a retrial.
• "Dull knife" - Joe find a woman's body in a frozen lake - a girl who'd been offered scholarships because she was so good at basketball, but who stayed on the reservation to care for her gran and met bad people. Heywood gives money to the Indians, claims to be one, but didn't try to save the girl. Joe thinks that if he'd known how sporty she'd been, he would have saved her.
• "Le Sauvage Noble (The Noble Savage)" - Jimmy from the States gets a job at Disneyland Paris, thanks to a relative. He performs as an Indian in shows. The USA-hating French side with him. On a one-night stand a French woman uses him to get pregnant. He realises that she did it to spite her rich husband. He cares about the wife and child. The husband kills Jimmy's relative. Jimmy kills the husband, making it look like an accident, planning to return to the States with the woman. But she's had an abortion - the pregnancy had already taught her previously neglectful husband a lesson. So he abandons her in a very dangerous part of Paris, at night. There are some swipes about the French, and some comic touches. One of the better stories, though some of the attempts to justify the emotions don't convince me.
• "Blood knot" - Hattie's woken early by her grandpa to go fishing. Since his wife died, he's aged. He stays in his river lodge rather than his big town house. She's there with her 2 older brothers and her parents on their dutiful annual visit - they're hoping for his money. After the fishing trip he gives her the keys to the lodge. 5 pages (1000 words) - too little space to make the ending or the characters surprising.
• "Shots fired: a requiem for Ander Esti" - Joe's send to investigate a shooting. 2 hunters, out with guns before the season started, had their car shot at. When he arrives he's surprised that they're able to point out where the shooter is. He recognises the shooter's sheep wagon - Esti uses it. He's a strange loner, a hard worker. When Joe approaches he finds Bryce there instead, a meths addict. There are shots. Joe disables Bryce who's murdered Esti. Joe tells him that Esti ws a good man. Joe talks to his dog - useful to progress the plot. A phrase like "Locals would literally wait until the opener" need editing.

There's an introduction where he tells us where he got his ideas from. The triggering events would have made me want to write stories. But not these stories.

Other reviews

• Goodreads (subtracted one star for Le Sauvage Noble - not noble by a long shot
• Kirkus reviews (Box generally avoids whodunits and surprises; the title story’s subtitle gives away its principal revelation. But if you’re looking for rising tension played out against spectacular natural scenery, nobody does it better.)