Monday's Reviews Today: C.J. Box's Latest & An 'Urban Farmer'

-- Publishers Weekly, 4/17/2009 7:42:00 AM

In C.J. Box's ninth novel featuring Joe Pickett, Below Zero, the Wyoming game warden discovers his foster daughter (who met a grisly fate in a previous novel) might still be alive.The book is a "relentlessly paced powder keg of a thriller" that "could be Box’s best to date." In food writer Novella Carpenter's "utterly enchanting" account of turning a patch of dirt in San Francisco into a thriving garden, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, we get a memoir with "an Annie Dillard lyricism" that delivers a juxtaposition of "farming life with inner-city grit that elevates it to the realm of the magical."

Below Zero
C.J. Box. Putnam, $24.95 (368p) ISBN 978-0-399-15575-8
Edgar-finalist Box’s ninth novel to feature Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett begins with a bombshell: could Pickett’s foster daughter, April, who apparently died six years earlier in a horrific conflagration when overzealous FBI agents confronted a group of dissident survivalists (see 2003’s Winterkill), still be alive? Pickett’s 17-year-old daughter, Sheridan, begins receiving disturbing text messages from someone claiming to be her dead sister, and Pickett’s entire family is forced to relive the tragedy. Even worse, whoever is sending these messages is traveling cross-country with suspected serial killers targeting people whose carbon footprint is too high. Still struggling with the guilt of not protecting April from her nightmarish fate in Winterkill, Pickett vows to save her this time, no matter the cost. Powered by provocative themes of environmental activism, this relentlessly paced powder keg of a thriller could be Box’s best to date. Author tour. (June)

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer
Novella Carpenter. Penguin Press, $25.95 (276p) ISBN 978-1-59420-221-6
In this utterly enchanting book, food writer Carpenter chronicles with grace and generosity her experiences as an “urban farmer.” With her boyfriend Bill’s help, her squatter’s vegetable garden in one of the worst parts of the Bay Area evolved into further adventures in bee and poultry keeping in the desire for such staples as home-harvested honey, eggs and home-raised meat. The built-in difficulties also required dealing with the expected noise and mess as well as interference both human and animal. When one turkey survived to see, so to speak, its way to the Thanksgiving table, the success spurred Carpenter to rabbitry and a monthlong plan to eat from her own garden. Consistently drawing on her Idaho ranch roots and determined even in the face of bodily danger, her ambitions led to ownership and care of a brace of pigs straight out of E.B. White. She chronicles the animals’ slaughter with grace and sensitivity, their cooking and consumption with a gastronome’s passion, and elegantly folds in riches like urban farming history. Her way with narrative and details, like the oddly poetic names of chicken and watermelon breeds, gives her memoir an Annie Dillard lyricism, but it’s the juxtaposition of the farming life with inner-city grit that elevates it to the realm of the magical. (June)