Western Mysteries
The trans-Mississippi West seems a great stage for mysteries. The urban East has its turf, especially New York City (and Spenser’s Boston, I hasten to add), and the West Coast has its mean streets, especially in Los Angeles. Florida and New Orleans can make good claims. But the big West, where scale is almost unimaginable compared to the size of a bullet, is an interesting and evocative place for the unknown and the human agent to make it known.
If you wanted to track a lineage for Western Mysteries, you could go back to Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods (1837) or Mark Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson (1894) or others soon to follow by Zane Grey and the explosion of “westerns” in the early 20th Century. For this page, however, in its launch, we will stick the most popular writers for Whistlestop in this category. Check back for more thought and more additions.
A Serpent's Tooth [Longmire #9]
A Serpent's Tooth [Longmire #9]
“It’s the scenery—and the big guy standing in front of the scenery—that keeps us coming back to Craig Johnson’s lean and leathery mysteries.”
—The New York Times Book Review
The ninth Longmire book from the New York Times bestselling author of Land of Wolves
It’s homecoming for the Durant Dogies when Cord Lynear, a Mormon “lost boy” forced off his compound for rebellious behavior, shows up in Absaroka County. Without much guidance, divine or otherwise, Sheriff Walt Longmire, Victoria Moretti, and Henry Standing Bear search for the boy’s mother and find themselves on a high-plains scavenger hunt that ends at the barbed-wire doorstep of an interstate polygamy group. Run by four-hundred-pound Roy Lynear, Cord’s father, the group is frighteningly well armed and very good at keeping secrets.
Walt’s got Cord locked up for his own good, but the Absaroka County jailhouse is getting crowded since the arrival of the boy’s self-appointed bodyguard, a dangerously spry old man who claims to be blessed by Joseph Smith himself. As Walt, Vic, and Henry butt heads with the Lynears, they hear whispers of Big Oil and the CIA and fear they might be dealing with a lot more than they bargained for.