Is it ever summer in Wyoming? Or spring? Or fall? It always seems to be winter in these Craig Johnson novels. Winter with a blizzard blowing and ground fog creeping up making for whiteout conditions. And into such disorienting conditions that would stupefy and overwhelm any ordinary human being, Walt Longmire must venture in order to pursue some really, really bad guy who must be brought to justice. Not only will he pursue but he will do so in spite of the fact that he has been shot and/or beaten and may be barely lucid, but he is led on by the spectral voice of his long-dead friend Virgil White Buffalo or by the otherworldly songs and drums of the ancient Cheyenne residents of the area. Such hallucinatory events play a big part in the Longmire psyche.
Indeed, the plots of these Longmire mysteries have become pretty predictable. After all, if you've got a winning formula, why change it?
We start out with Walt investigating some murder. In this instance, it's not even a death in his county and may not even be murder, but his old friend and mentor, Lucian Connally, inveigles him into probing into the facts surrounding a death in an adjoining county that was ruled a suicide. The widow doesn't believe it and the widow is an old "friend" of Lucian's.
The victim was an investigator for the sheriff's department assigned to looking into cold cases or unsolved cases. Walt's investigation reveals that the man was looking into the disappearances of three women in the area and it looks like the disappearances could be related. It seems that there could be a serial killer, or at least a serial kidnapper, in the area. But, for some unknown reason, the investigator had checked into a local motel, locked the door, and then shot himself twice in the head. The first was a glancing blow but the second was a killing shot.
Walt can't find anything to disprove suicide but he wonders why this man with a spotless reputation for integrity would have taken his own life. It turns out to be a very complicated tale that Walt must solve while working against the clock.
That clock is quickly running down to the time his first grandchild is supposed to arrive in Philadelphia and his daughter, Cady, insists that he be there. He's got a plane to catch, but can he catch the bad guys first?
Meantime, his "undersheriff" Victoria Moretti - he always calls her his undersheriff, although she seems to prefer to be on top - shows up at the motel where Walt is staying and jumps his bones. They have hot, rumply sex, which is never actually described but only alluded to. (This, too, is a standard feature of these plots.) And then Vic assists him in his investigation.
In the end, we return to the situation as I've described in the first paragraph. There. I've given you the plot outlines of Craig Johnson's books, so now you don't have to read them. But if you don't, you'll miss out on a lot of sardonic wit and sparkling dialog between the characters who inhabit and assist the Absaroka Sheriff's Department, as well as vivid descriptions of the Wyoming landscape. That unique humor that often makes me laugh out loud is the main reason why I keep reading this series.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Time to check in once again on Sheriff Walt Longmire and the quirky residents of Absaroka County, Wyoming. This time there is definitely something rotten in the county but at first it is not clear just what it is.
The action kicks off with an old lady telling Walt about the angels that have been helping her out by doing repairs and chores around her house. It seems that she leaves out a list of the things she needs to have done and somehow they all get taken care of. She never sees any of the angels actually at work.
His curiosity awakened, Walt decides to investigate the miracle and discovers a teenage boy who is the actual angel in the flesh. Walt learns that he is a "lost boy" cast out from a cultish offshoot of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that has set up operation in his county. He puts the boy, named Cord, in a cell until he can contact Child Welfare and figure out what to do with him, then gets him a job at the local diner, washing dishes and generally helping out. But the boy keeps "escaping" and is soon joined by a ragamuffin old man who describes himself as Cord's bodyguard.
As Walt continues to investigate and get further involved, he learns that the boy's mother (from the cult) has been looking for him. He also learns that she is actually originally from the county and her mother, from whom she is estranged, still lives there and runs a bookstore. When he tries to gain access to the cult's property in order to talk with the mother, he is denied entrance. With no probable cause, he has to engage in some roundabout investigatory methods to try to get at the answers to all the questions that have been raised in his mind.
Meanwhile, some very nasty characters are crawling out from under the rocks turned over by Walt and his deputies, and Absaroka County is proving to be a very dangerous place for those deputies.
The best thing about these Walt Longmire books is that we get to experience them inside the quick and nimble mind of Walt. It's a mind that is marked by an affection for the unconventional and sometimes kooky and offbeat set of humanity that populates the county, the laws of which he is sworn to uphold. He has an open mind and heart toward these people and he prefers to just "let it be" and "live and let live" whenever possible. But he also has a keen sense of justice - and injustice - and he always tries to find a way to allow the better angels, even if they are just "lost boys," to triumph.
Longmire is quite simply a very humane and engaging character, always fun to read about.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Needing a bridge, something that wouldn't tax my brain too much, to take me between more serious readings, I turned to Craig Johnson's Walt Longmire series.
I don't mean to denigrate Johnson's writing. He's very entertaining and he writes with a light touch and a lot of sardonic Western humor. Sometimes that is exactly what a reader needs and this was one of those times.
As the Crow Flies is the eighth book in the series. Having read the first seven in order, I was ready to see where Walt's and Henry Standing Bear's adventures would take them this time. I was amused to learn that their latest caper was as wedding planners.
Walt's daughter, Cady, is getting married in two weeks at the time that the novel begins, and Walt and Henry have been tasked with securing a venue and making the plans. Things are not going swimmingly.
Cady wants to get married on the Reservation and Henry believed he had reserved the site for the occasion, but then the person in charge of the place informed him that she had okayed the site for another purpose on the date in question. Now Henry and Walt must find a new site or find a way to change her mind.
They opt to look for a new venue and head out to an area of scenic cliffs. While looking around, they observe a woman on top of one of the cliffs. And then they see her fall onto the rocks below. They manage to reach her just at the moment of her death.
Walt's dog (unimaginatively named Dog) was with them and he finds a bundle that had rolled away from the woman's body. It is a blanket wrapped around a baby. It's evident that the baby was in the woman's arms when she fell and he is alive and not seriously hurt.
Since they are on Reservation land, they contact the new Chief of Police there, a young woman named Lolo Long. She has a prickly relationship with the two and with almost everyone else with whom she comes in contact, but, of course, she and Walt wind up working together to investigate the death.
Things become more complicated a few days later when the dead woman's abusive alcoholic husband is found dead also. He had been shot. There's no question that this was murder, but was the woman's death murder, suicide, or accident? Is someone trying to get rid of the family? What motive could possibly exist?
Walt and Lolo, along with Henry, negotiate the convoluted Reservation relationships and attempt to piece together what has happened and who is responsible. Meanwhile, Cady and her soon-to-be mother-in-law arrive in town and begin making the arrangements for the wedding themselves.
This was a very quick and highly entertaining read. There were none of the things in this narrative that I've sometimes found annoying in the earlier books. In fact, I would say this is my favorite Walt Longmire novel so far. The plot moves quickly and most of the characters are old friends and the new ones, like Lolo, are nicely fleshed out with interesting back stories. I think Johnson is on a roll with this series.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Hidden somewhere in Walt Longmire's closet must be one of those special suits that cartoon superheroes wear. A red, white, and blue cape with matching tights perhaps. He certainly gives every indication of being one of the Indestructibles in this entry of Craig Johnson's series about the sheriff of Absaroka County, Wyoming. He endures a blizzard with gale-force winds and temperatures of forty degrees below zero, a forest fire that traps him in a lake and forces him to go underwater to survive, days with little food and less sleep, confronting a mountain lion, being shot, nearly falling off a mountain - the list goes on and on. But, in the end, he's left alive, sitting on his front porch enjoying pleasant spring weather with his friend Henry Standing Bear, his deputy/lover Vic Moretti, and his daughter Cady.
We only get that one glimpse of pleasant weather. It seems that all of these Walt Longmire stories take place in winter when a blizzard is blowing through the Wyoming mountains. And winter seems to last for much of the year. The action in Hell is Empty takes place in May but winter is still most definitely on the scene.
The action opens with Walt and his deputy Santiago Saizarbitoria (aka Sancho) helping to transport three convicts, murderers all, on their way to their assigned prisons. Transporting convicts across rugged country in a van...hmm, I wonder what could go wrong.
A full force of law enforcement is involved, including FBI and other local sheriffs and prison guards, but, soon enough, what we expected happens and the criminals escape, killing or wounding several of the lawmen in the process. Walt and Sancho were not present at this time, but they soon realize that something is wrong and find the scene of carnage and the convicts gone, taking hostages with them.
One of the convicts is a particularly bad character, a sociopath whom Walt has lately learned had, ten years earlier, killed a young man named Owen White Buffalo. Walt has history with the White Buffalo family, particularly Virgil White Buffalo, who we met in a previous book and who we eventually learn was Owen's grandfather. Part of the reason for the convicts being taken through that part of Wyoming was that the killer had promised to show them where he had buried the victim.
With a storm on the way and communication with the outside world patchy at best, Walt leaves Sancho in charge of the wounded and heads out on his own to track the sociopath. Sancho fills a backpack of supplies for Walt and includes the book he was currently reading, one that was on a list recommended to him by his co-workers. It is Dante's Inferno. Let's see, wasn't Virgil the guide through the different levels of that Hell? I wonder if there could be a connection...
I won't really bore you with the plot. In fact, there isn't much of one except that Walt pushes on through fire and ice, and refuses to give up when any sensible human being would have stopped and waited for the back-up which was on the way. He chases his prey up Cloud Peak, where he's been before in this series. It might as well be named Mystic Mountain, because every time he goes up it, he seems to have a mystical experience involving the spirits of long-dead Indians. Spirits which he refuses to acknowledge or discuss once he gets off the mountain.
This novel was written as a thriller and had very little of the sardonic humor that usually makes the series such a pleasure to read. Moreover, there was little or no interaction with the supporting characters that are so much a part of these stories. It was just all Walt, Superhero, all the way through. It wasn't bad. The connection between Dante's Inferno and that Virgil and Walt's Inferno and Virgil White Buffalo may have been laid on a bit thick, but I found it interesting. The sections featuring Walt's conversations with Virgil White Buffalo were the most enjoyable parts for me. On the whole, though, this was not one of my favorite Longmire stories.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I needed something light and undemanding to read and I decided to turn to Craig Johnson's Walt Longmire series. It was a fortuitous choice.
This sixth book in the series is the best one yet, in my opinion. Johnson is on his game with the dry humor that is the best thing about the series, and the action takes place in Durant so all of those supporting characters that we've come to like so much are there and are doing their thing.
The plot is a somewhat convoluted one with a lot of subplots lurking in the background, and much of the action turns on the fact that it is the dead of winter in Wyoming, just around Valentine's Day, and the temperature hardly gets above zero Fahrenheit. Moreover, there is snow, snow, and yet more snow.
Still, life goes on in its quirky fashion in Durant, beginning with a 72-year-old junkman named Geo Stewart getting accidentally tied to the rear bumper of a 1968 Oldsmobile Toronado that his granddaughter-in-law was driving to the store. The explanation of just how that came to happen leads to even more complications and after that the whole thing really begins to spin out of control.
In an unrelated incident, Geo ends up dead after an altercation with a neighbor whose mother, a retired school teacher, he was having an affair with. The neighbor was a real estate developer who wanted to close down the man's junkyard and build more ranchettes on the property.
It turns out there is more going on on that junkyard property than just the junkyard. The old man's grandson has "a little 4-H project" growing hydroponically in a tunnel under the junkyard. Someone had to finance all the state of the art equipment used in that operation and the money sure didn't come from junk! So, where did it come from?
Meanwhile, a styrofoam cooler with a man's severed thumb tip in it has been found at the junkyard and Walt assigns his deputy Santiago Saizarbitoria, aka Sancho, to find out whose thumb it is and how it came to be there. The only thing is, Walt knows who the thumb belongs to because its owner has been going around town asking if anyone has found it, but the sheriff wants to keep Sancho busy and occupied because he's suffering from PTSD and Walt's afraid he's going to quit.
Walt's best friend, Henry Standing Bear, is living at the jail temporarily because all the pipes are frozen at his place and he has no water; Walt's other deputy and sometime lover, Victoria Moretti, is trying to buy a house; Ruby, the receptionist, is keeping them all straight; and Dorothy at the Busy Bee Cafe is still serving up "the usual" every day.
Walt can hardly move without suffering some unlikely injury, including getting bitten in the butt by a wolf-dog, one of the eponymous "junkyard dogs." He, of course, ignores all of his injuries and carries on in his usual fashion.
Soon, there are more deaths and Walt and his deputies suddenly have plenty to keep them busy, and, along the way, his dog (named Dog) earns his kibble.
This was a thoroughly satisfying read. The incidents depicted are absurd and yet they have a degree of internal logic. And Walt continues to exhibit a kind of Zen-like balance in his approach to life and to policing that is very appealing.
I'm still not happy with the Walt/Vic relationship; it seems forced and not at all "balanced," a departure for Walt and for Johnson, but I can tolerate it as long as the rest of the writing is this good.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Well, that was fun. This fifth entry in Craig Johnson's Walt Longmire series was a quick and entertaining weekend read. It contained all of the elements that have made this such a likable series for me and few of the ones that I have found annoying in the past.
Sheriff Walt Longmire of Absaroka County, Wyoming is called on to go undercover in The Dark Horse. The problem is that his undercover work is to be done in an adjoining county, in fact the county where he grew up and where the old Longmire family home is. He's not unknown in these parts, so being an anonymous undercover cop is a challenge to say the least.
The challenge comes about because Absaroka County has been sent a prisoner to house. They don't have enough criminals to keep their cells filled so when other counties have an overflow and need additional cells, they send them to Absaroka. But the sheriff of the adjoining county, an old friend of Walt's, might just have an ulterior motive in sending him this particular prisoner.
She's a young woman accused of having shot her husband in the head six times and then burning the house down around the body after he had burned her horses alive. She has confessed to the crime, but the sheriff has some concerns about that confession and wants someone he trusts to take a look at the case. Enter Walt Whitmire.
Walt goes to the little town where the crime occurred in the guise of an insurance investigator. It's a town with a population of forty souls. It is called Absalom, which gives Craig/Walt a chance to muse on how the town got such a name and to show off his knowledge of the Bible and of Faulkner.
There are some interesting characters in this mini-town. First among them is a barmaid named Juana. She is an undocumented Guatemalan immigrant who came to Absalom by way of Chicago where she had married a Cheyenne construction worker. They had a son named Benjamin. After her husband was killed in an accident, she brought her half-Cheyenne son to Wyoming near the Cheyenne reservation and has been attempting to make a life for them there. She went to the local community college and took a course in criminal justice but was unable to finish because she ran out of money. But she is an enthusiastic practitioner of the investigatory skills that she learned and it doesn't take her long to rumble Longmire's cover.
Then there is an old cowpuncher named Herschel who worked for the couple at the center of the tale, the alleged victim and the alleged murderess. He despised the victim and idolized the murderess. Juana, who also worked for the couple, had the same opinion, as did, it seems, just about everyone in the town. I'm sensing a theme here.
As Walt is able to talk to his prisoner by bribing her with his dog (named Dog), he learns more about her, including the fact that she is a sleepwalker who takes Ambien(!). She was a barrel racer and owned a championship racer, a black mare named Wahoo Sue, who her husband hated and took out of the barn one day and told his wife later that he had killed her. The wife, knowing how he enjoyed torturing things, doesn't believe him and thinks the horse is still alive somewhere but in great pain. How did her S.O.B. of a husband live as long as he did?
Well, all of this makes for an intriguing plot and we get to follow Walt as he proceeds with his investigation and talks to the locals. Craig Johnson's ear for the vernacular is astute and it is a pleasure to read these conversations and to enjoy the dry wit with which they are imbued.
Humor and Johnson's use of language in conveying a sense of the fantastic setting that is Wyoming are two of the strong points of this series. Both are on full display here.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was the second mystery that I've read recently that was set in Wyoming. The other was one of C.J. Box's Joe Pickett books. Both of the books had visits by characters in them to the Hole-in-the-Wall, the famous hideout of outlaws, most notably of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It wasn't a major plot point in either book, but I found it interesting and coincidental that they both mentioned the place.
Another Man's Moccasins was the fourth in Craig Johnson's Walt Longmire series, and I approached reading it with some trepidation because I had found number three in the series to be a major disappointment. Fortunately, I needn't have worried. This book finds Longmire back in Wyoming, after his sojourn in Philadelphia and in this one the embarrassing and inappropriate interactions between Walt and his sexy chief deputy, Vic Moretti, are kept to a minimum and don't interfere with the plot, so that was a plus.
The plot of the book takes us to two different locations and two different periods in time: there is present day Absaroka County, Wyoming and 1968 Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam. Both places and times are seen through Longmire's eyes.
I found it quite interesting to get some of the backstory of Longmire's - and, incidentally, Henry Standing Bear's - time in Vietnam. We learn that Longmire served as a Marine Corps investigator there and that he befriended a young prostitute in the bar that he frequented. This becomes important because, forty years later, the body of a young Vietnamese woman who had been murdered is dumped in a road ditch in Absaroka County and when he goes through her effects Walt finds a picture of that other young woman that he had befriended and in the background of the picture, playing the piano, is none other than a young Walt Longmire. What could be the connection between these two women? And what could have possibly brought the murder victim to Absaroka County? Was she looking for Walt? And if so, why?
Things become complicated when it turns out that the place where the murder victim was dumped is near a culvert where a homeless Crow Indian named Virgil White Buffalo has been living. Virgil is a giant of a man who is also a veteran and who has had a checkered history, having been imprisoned not once but twice for crimes that he did not commit. And now the sheriff of Absaroka County is arresting him again on suspicion of murder, even though Walt is unconvinced that he has any connection to the crime. His presence in the vicinity of the body and the fact that he attacked Walt at the scene is enough reason to put him behind bars.
Meanwhile, there is a subplot of Walt's daughter, Cady, recovering from the injuries that she sustained in Philadelphia in book number three, and a visit by her new Philadelphia boyfriend, Michael Moretti, Vic's brother. Moreover, we get to better know some of the other new deputies in the sheriff's department, especially the Basque nicknamed (by Vic) Sancho. He gets a fairly major role in this story.
All in all, this was a thoroughly satisfying read and I feel that Johnson is back on track now. I just hope that in the future he lets Walt stay in Wyoming where he belongs and - please! - let's have no more of the May-December romance between Walt and Vic. It's just off-putting.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Maybe there is time to sneak in another guilty pleasure book before the end of 2017. After all, it's not like I have a queue full of award-winning current literary books that I need to finish. Oh. Wait.
Well, anyway, I also had this third Craig Johnson book in my queue, so I might as well tick that box, right? Problem is, this one turned out to be more guilty than pleasure.
The premise is that Sheriff Walt Longmire and his best friend, Henry Standing Bear, along with Dog, take a road trip in Henry's baby blue classic Thunderbird convertible. They head out to Philadelphia where Henry is to exhibit some of his historical photographs at a museum and Walt is to visit his daughter, Cady, the Philadelphia lawyer, and Dog is to, well, be a dog.
They arrive in the big city, where Walt is met at Cady's apartment by his deputy, Victoria Moretti's mother, Lena. (Vic, you see, is originally a Philadelphia girl and all of her male relatives - her father and various brothers - are in the police force there.) Before Walt even gets to see Cady, she is assaulted and suffers serious injuries that result in a subdural hematoma that leaves her in a coma and with an uncertain future.
The rest of the book is spent with Walt waiting for Cady to wake up and trying to determine the motive for the attack on her and who did it. In this endeavor, he is assisted by the Philadelphia police, particularly the Moretti boys, and, of course, Henry.
The reason for the attack and for subsequent deaths, as bodies start dropping all over the place, turns out to be quite complicated and the logic not that easy to follow. Moreover, the things that I really like about this series - the humor, the description of the Wyoming setting and the relationships between the regular cast of characters there - are mostly missing from this entry. Vic does eventually show up in Philadelphia but it would have been better if she'd stayed in Wyoming.
Plus, it just seemed very unbelievable to me that the Philadelphia police would simply defer to this unknown sheriff from Wyoming in the investigation, even if the Morettis do vouch for him. And Walt and Henry charge around the city like natives, finding their way with no difficulty. That hasn't been my experience with unfamiliar cities.
About halfway through this book, the whole thing just went off the rails for me. It started reading like a romance novel instead of a mystery/thriller. It was extremely awkward and offputting and felt wrong, and the plot never recovered as far as I was concerned.
This was definitely my least favorite of the Walt Longmire books I've read so far. I know Johnson is capable of better than this. Let's hope he achieves it with the next book.
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
The last book I read was Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere. Then I opened this book and read the first sentence: "They used fire, back in the day." I had to chuckle. What a segue! Perhaps I had been fated to read this book next.
That first sentence is spoken by a gravedigger, attempting to dig a hole in the middle of a Wyoming winter. He's referring to the practice of building a huge bonfire on top of the spot where a grave was to be dug in hopes of thawing out the ground enough to dig.
The gravedigger has a lot of miscellany about the disposal of earthly remains that he happily shares with Sheriff Walt Longmire of Absaroka County as he digs and Walt stands by watching and freezing. In fact, it is a constant irritating stream of information, until finally, Walt can stand it no longer.
"Jules?"
"Yep?"
I turned and looked down at him. "Do you ever shut up?"
He tipped his battered cowboy hat back on his head and took the final swig, still smiling. "Nope."
Like Jules, all the characters in Craig Johnson's books are never at a loss for words. Not for them the strong, silent Westerner stereotype. And the dialogues between these characters are a pure delight to read, often laugh-out-loud funny.
This is the second book in the series. I read the first only a few weeks ago and couldn't wait to continue with the next one. I think I may be falling in love with Craig Johnson/Walt Longmire.
The action in this book is only a few weeks after the ending of the first one. (The grave that Jules is trying to dig is for one of the leftover bodies of that book.) The case begins with the death of an elderly woman at the Durant Home for Assisted Living. The death appears to be from natural causes, but the former sheriff of Absaroka County who is a resident at the home insists that it is murder and Walt decides to take a closer look.
An autopsy reveals that the old sheriff was right; the woman was poisoned.
The victim's name was Mari Baroja and she was Basque. Looking into her history in search of a possible motive for her killing gives Walt a view into Basque customs. He also learns of an appalling history of domestic abuse which the woman endured from her violent husband. But in the early 1950s, while the former sheriff now in the assisted living home was in office, that husband disappeared, leaving Mari with three children to raise.
And raise them she did, although the oldest, her son, was killed in Vietnam. Her twin daughters and the son's daughter survive her. Now, Walt finds that Mari's land has a methane drilling operation on it and the old woman in the Durant home was, in fact, a multi-millionaire. Reason enough perhaps for her descendants to wish to hasten her demise.
Of course, it's a lot more complicated than that, and soon the number of dead bodies is mounting and Mari's granddaughter is the victim of a vicious attack.
Never mind, Walt will sort it all out with the help of his friend Henry Standing Bear, his foul-mouthed deputy Vic Moretti, his brand new deputy Santiago Saizarbitoria, and assorted other friends and helpers.
One thing is for sure: Walt Longmire will never be "without company."
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Various people who have read my reviews of C.J. Box's books (the few that I've read) have suggested to me that I should read Craig Johnson's Longmire series. They kept telling me that he was a very good writer. So curiosity got the better of me and I decided to see for myself, and after reading the first book in the series, I have to say that I don't think they steered me wrong.
Now, no one will mistake Johnson's writing for great literature, but it is highly entertaining. He writes with humor and a light touch and a fine eye for the Wyoming landscape and culture. He's created some interesting and well-described characters that the reader can invest in and care about.
The one thing that this first book might have used was a better editor. I was frequently annoyed by the sloppy editing. For example, when the sheriff is securing a crime site, it is written as "sight". Later when he placed a piece of evidence on the bar, he "sat' the evidence on the bar. Lodestar becomes "loadstar". There were numerous such errors and they really set (not sat) my teeth on edge. It's the kind of thing that drives me nuts! Maybe it's being married to an editor all these years.
But, that complaint aside, this was a good and satisfying read.
When we meet Sheriff Walter Longmire of Absaroka County, Wyoming, he has been the sheriff for twenty-four years, much of his adult life. He's now in middle age and is hoping to groom one of his deputies, a woman, to succeed him as sheriff. She would be the first woman sheriff in Wyoming.
The plot revolves around the consequences of a gang rape of a young Cherokee woman by a group of teenage white boys and the minimal sentences they received for their horrific crime. The crime and the sentences divided the community. Some, particularly in the Indian community, were outraged by the light sentences. Others felt the boys' lives should not be ruined for one adolescent crime. Never mind what that crime did to the girl's life.
This all happened in the past. The boys had already served their sentences at the opening of this story and were back in the community.
Then one of the boys is killed, shot from a great distance with a big gun. Some evidence at the scene seems to point to someone from the local reservation having committed the crime and Walt suspects that the death might be related to the earlier rape.
Then another of the rapists is killed in the same manner, which gives credence to the sheriff's suspicions. He must now hunt for the killer while simultaneously trying to keep the other rapists from being killed.
Sheriff Longmire is aided by the aforementioned deputy Victoria Moretti and his lifelong friend Henry Standing Bear as well as other assorted deputies and community assets. He'll need all the help he can get because in the middle of the manhunt, a blizzard is coming.
As if the problems presented by his job were not enough, Walt Longmire's personal life is a mess. His wife died four years earlier, his only daughter is off being a Philadelphia lawyer, and he is a lonely man living in a shell of a house and bordering on a serious drinking problem.
All in all, this was a good beginning to what has become a very long-running series.
Incidentally, my husband and I have watched the television series, Longmire, that is based on these books and it is not bad. But, although the ending here stretched my credulity, I thought the book was better.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
