The Nature of Things

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...

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 general...

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 cha...

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 mo...

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 explan...

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 p...

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 differen...

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 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, ...

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 ...