Kindness Goes Unpunished

December 11, 2006
In Johnson's appealing third Walt Longmire mystery (after 2006's
\t\t Death Without Company), the Wyoming sheriff
\t\t is drawn into a messy situation in the City of Brotherly Love when his daughter
\t\t Cady's ex-boyfriend is killed a few days after Longmire accuses him of being
\t\t behind the assault that left Cady, a Philadelphia lawyer, comatose. Longmire's
\t\t deputy, Victoria Moretti, soon arrives on the scene as her family of Philly
\t\t cops tries to decide whether to suspect Longmire of murder or ask his help with
\t\t the investigation. Everyone in the cast appears to be a stereotype of some
\t\t sort—the Italian police clan, the Salvadoran drug dealer, the Irish publican
\t\t and Longmire's eternally wise and mystical Cheyenne friend, Henry Standing
\t\t Bear—but Johnson plays it for the right kind of laughs. When someone
\t\t introduces Henry as Longmire's "Native American sidekick," Longmire ripostes
\t\t that it's the other way around. The quick pace and tangled web of
\t\t interconnected crimes will keep readers turning pages.

March 1, 2007
Absaroka County, Wyoming, Sheriff Walt Longmire goes on a rare road trip in this third entry in a consistently entertaining series. The trip has two purposes: visit Walt's daughter, Cady, a lawyer in Philadelphia, and support his best friend, Henry Standing Bear, who is the guest of honor at the opening of an exhibit of Native American photographs. Plans change quickly when Cady, the victim of a vicious attack, hovers near death. After Cady's former boyfriend and the assumed perpetrator of the attack is killed, Walt takes matters into his own hands, with the help of Henry and Victoria Moretti, Walt's deputy, a Philadelphia native who returns home to ride shotgun. There is a built-in problem whenever a mystery author takes his series on the road: without the defining landscape, the characters often seem stripped of their personalities. That's the case here, to some extent, though Johnson uses the fish-out-of-water theme effectively, setting up Walt as a kind of McCloud in the 1970s Dennis Weaver television show. Satisfying as road trips go, but fans will be glad to have Walt back in Wyoming.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)