Death Without Company: A Longmire Mystery Author: Visit Amazon's Craig Johnson Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0143124811 | Format: PDF
Death Without Company: A Longmire Mystery Description
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Johnson's second Walt Longmire novel more than fulfills the expectations created by the series debut,
The Cold Dish (2004). Longmire, the aging, kindly, but tenacious sheriff of Wyoming's Absaroka County, once again finds himself involved in a murder case with tentacles reaching deep into the fabric of daily life in his insular mountain community. It all begins with the death of a Basque woman in an assisted-living home, but the circumstances of that death prompt Longmire and his bantering, foulmouthed deputy, Victoria Moretti, to begin nosing around in the victim's past. The trail leads in multiple directions, most of which converge on Longmire's mentor, former sheriff Lucian Connally. Like C. J. Box in his Joe Pickett series, Johnson uses the landscape of the Wyoming high country to evoke the sense of lives crushing in upon one another, as secrets refuse to stay buried, and old wounds continue to fester. Box's hero, Joe Pickett, is an outsider in his world, however, and Longmire is very much a comfortable part of Absaroka County, a kind of old shoe, in fact, like former sheriff Bill Gastner in Steven Hamill's series set in the very different landscape of Posadas County, New Mexico. Johnson combines a vivid sense of the dailiness of life--and the way human relationships take root in that dailiness--with a sure--handed touch for jolting both his characters and his readers out of their comfort zones and deep into harm's way. It's hard to ask for more in a literary mystery.
Bill OttCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
Walt and his idiosyncratic crew are terrific company--droll, sassy and surprisingly tenderhearted. --
Kirkus Reviews, starred --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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- Series: Walt Longmire Mysteries
- Paperback: 320 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books; Mti edition (May 22, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0143124811
- ISBN-13: 978-0143124818
- Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
- Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Craig Johnson grows on one. I was intrigued into reading his first novel, THE COLD DISH, by a review on DorothyL. I wasn't sure what to think of it, for in many ways it turned the rules of mystery writing, if not on their side, at least at a severe angle. Who ever heard of a rural sheriff with a degree in English Literature and who quotes Shakespeare with great regularity? There have been Native American sidekicks before, but rarely one who speaks English with high grammar and never uses a contraction. Said sidekick has a degree in classical literature, but runs a rural bar and is conversant in the languages of four different tribes. And then there is the female deputy-female, mind you, whose favorite word is a four-letter word (or one of its variants) that begins with the letter "f." And the former Sheriff, who still struggles with the fact that the style of law enforcement of the old west is no longer accepted in modern jurisprudence.
However, I was intrigued enough to read Johnson's second book, DEATH WITHOUT COMPANY. I'm glad I did. The same characters are back, as they look into whether the death of an elderly woman in a rest home was a death by natural causes or a murder. In so doing, they look back at the history of Basque sheepherders who settled in Wyoming, after the Second World War, and how their culture and that of the Anglo culture interacted while never mixing.
Sheriff Walt Longmire, a Vietnam War veteran who got his degree in English Literature before being drafted, is the Sheriff of the least-populated county in Wyoming, one that covers about the same number of acres as the State of Vermont. He is sensitive, grieving from the deaths of both his wife, five years earlier, and a woman with whom he was falling in love, in the first novel.
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