RETURN TO SENDER

Walt Longmire goes undercover.

When his late wife’s cousin Mike Thurman, a postal inspector, asks Walt to find out what happened to Blair McGowan, who never showed up for her 307-mile-long mail route, he agrees. Blair’s boyfriend, Benny Schweppe, sold all her stuff soon after she disappeared, so Walt tracks down her 1968 Travelall and buys it back, then starts following Blair’s route, pretending he’s taking it over. Since most of the route covers the vast Red Desert, an unlikely feature of south-central Wyoming, Walt’s not terribly hopeful about finding Blair, an environmental activist who upset some of the groups living out there. Visiting Blair’s neighbor, Walt gets into a fight with Benny and ends up getting arrested. As the famous sheriff of Absaroka County, Walt can’t remain unknown to local law enforcers, who fill him in on the case. Benny, who’s heard that Walt is a sheriff (so much for undercover), tells him about the Order of the Red Gate, a religious cult that moves around the desert. It’s run by Zeno Carruthers, who Blair knew in the 1980s when she was in a documentary about alien abduction in California. After Walt starts out on the mail run, Tess Anderson, who Mike Thurman assigned to help him find the way, finds a piece of paper that turns out to be a note saying “SAVE ME” in red lipstick. Venturing into the desert, Walt finds the cult, which consists of a lot of bewildered older folks and a few very tough bodyguards for the cult leaders, who are running a scheme to steal money from their followers, many of whom vanish, supposedly gone to heaven. What follows is a violent, dangerous effort to free the cult members, including Blair.

The straight-shooting hero is welcome in duplicitous times, but it’s the magnificent desert that captures the imagination.