A SERPENT'S TOOTH

The vast, lonely spaces of rural Wyoming attract some unusual lifestyles. It’s up to Sheriff Walt Longmire to sort the good from the bad.

Longmire’s problems start when Cord Lynear, a Mormon “lost boy” who’s been thrown out of a polygamous Mormon compound so that the older men can have their choice of women, wanders into Absaroka County looking for his mother. Assisting Longmire, as usual, are his friend Henry Standing Bear, aka The Cheyenne Nation, and his deputy Victoria Moretti, a tough, beautiful woman he considers much too young for him. Among the strange people he turns up in his quest are a man who claims to be 200-year-old Mormon enforcer Orrin Porter Rockwell; Cord’s grandmother, Eleanor Tisdale, who runs a bar and store in the tiny town of Short Drop; Roy Lynear, who owns a large, heavily fortified ranch and who may be Cord’s father; and Tomás Bidarte, a Mexican poet who’s handy with a knife. A visit to another Lynear compound in South Dakota leads to a run-in with more lost boys and a confrontation with yet more Lynears. A little help from a friend in the CIA identifies Rockwell as CIA agent Dale Tisdale, reportedly killed in a plane crash in Mexico. When someone burns the sheriff substation and almost kills one of his deputies, Longmire and his friends take actions that may be the death of them.

Longmire’s ninth (As the Crow Flies, 2012, etc.) is a tense, action-filled story with Johnson’s usual touches of humor and romance. No wonder Longmire’s TV series has been renewed for a second season.