The Dark Horse: A Walt Longmire Mystery Author: Craig Johnson | Language: English | ISBN:
B0026NBZCQ | Format: PDF
The Dark Horse: A Walt Longmire Mystery Description
Walt doubts a confession of murder in this novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Cold Dish and As the Crow Flies, the fifth in the Walt Longmire Mystery Series, the basis for LONGMIRE, the hit A&E original drama series Fans of Ace Atkins, Nevada Barr and Robert B. Parker will love
The Dark Horse is the fifth installment in
New York Times bestselling author Craig Johnson's Walt Longmire mystery series, the basis for
LONGMIRE, the hit A&E original drama series. Wade Barsad, a man with a dubious past and a gift for making enemies, burned his wife Mary's horses in their barn; in retribution, she shot him in the head six times. But Sheriff Walt Longmire of Wyoming's Absaroka County doesn't believe Mary's confession. Leaving behind the demands of his upcoming re-election campaign, Walt unpins his star to go undercover and discovers that everyone-including a beautiful Guatemalan bartender and a rancher with a taste for liquor-had a reason for wanting Wade dead.
- File Size: 443 KB
- Print Length: 346 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0670020877
- Publisher: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (May 28, 2009)
- Sold by: Penguin Group (USA) LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B0026NBZCQ
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,871 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
Late last year, Craig Johnson and his Walt Longmire mysteries came to occupy a rarified space in my world -- a favorite author for whom you wait in anticipation of his next book, looking forward to the moment you get to crack it open and find out what your friends on the page are up to this time. Johnson's mysteries are well structured and compelling, not relying on gimmicks or tricks, but instead on fleshed out characters, snappy dialogue, close observation of human nature, and a vivid landscape that is just as important as any person in the book.
Longmire, the maybe-retiring-in-a-few-years sheriff of fictional Absaroka County, Wyoming, isn't a supercop or a kick-butt guy like Lee Child's Jack Reacher. He's an older guy, a Vietnam vet, and a Wyoming native. He grew up on a ranch, is a widower with one daughter, and a strong sense of justice that is served well by his skills as a steady methodical cop. More than that, he's an interesting person, something of a renaissance man without feeling forced (as Reacher can at times). This is a good thing as the mysteries are all in first person so if we were bored with Walt, we'd have a problem and not much reason to keep reading.
While the Longmire mysteries are well stocked with eccentric characters, it's his two primary sidekicks -- Henry Standing Bear and Victoria "Vic" Moretti -- who stand out. The Bear, aka The Cheyenne Nation, is Walt's oldest and best friend, a fellow vet, and his guide in the Native American reservations and communities. Moretti, his detective, is a transplant from Philadelphia, an excellent cop, and perhaps one of the sexiest and foulest mouthed law enforcement characters in current fiction. In all three cases, the characters have grown and changed over the course of the books.
When I began blogging last June, one of the very first authors I raved about was Craig Johnson. Get ready to listen to more raves because my opinion of him is unchanged.
In this fifth book of the series, we see the Sheriff of Absaroka County, Wyoming, working undercover as an insurance agent in the tiny, ill-tempered town of Absalom. Absalom resident Wade Barstad, well-known womanizer and jerk-about-town, set fire to his barn. The fire roasted alive his wife's horses, which didn't set too well with Mary. Mary Barstad waited till Wade went to bed. She then proceeded to put six bullets in his head and set fire to the house. When the fire department showed up, Mary confessed to killing her husband. But the sheriff in that county smells a rat, and he soon has Walt Longmire sniffing the very same eau de rongeur. Seeing as how most Absalom residents would just as soon shoot strangers as look at 'em, will Walt have enough time to figure out what really happened?
Although Johnson writes of his corner of Wyoming as if it's a character in and of itself, it's really the two-legged ones for whom you want to read this series. Each a rugged individualist, learning everyone's outlooks on life as well as their relationships with the other characters is the meat and potatoes of these books. The mystery is the huge wedge of lemon meringue pie that puts a satisfied PAID to the entire meal.
It's difficult to write a novel about the West and not have the landscape have its say. Just ask Hillerman or Bowen or Box...or Craig Johnson:
"I thought about how we tilled and cultivated the land, planted trees on it, fenced it, built houses on it, and did everything we could to hold off the eternity of distance-- anything to give the landscape some sort of human scale.
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