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.
The Dark Horse [Longmire # 5]
The Dark Horse [Longmire # 5]
Walt doubts a confession of murder in this novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Western Star
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 Longmire Mystery Series, the basis for LONGMIRE, the hit Netflix 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, or so the story goes. But Sheriff Walt Longmire doesn’t believe Mary’s confession and is determined to dig deeper. Unpinning his star to pose as an insurance investigator, Walt visits the Barsad ranch and discovers that everyone in town–including a beautiful Guetemalan bartender and a rancher with a taste for liquor–had a reason for wanting Wade dead.