Hell Is Empty
A Longmire Mystery
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4.5 • 17 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Walt Longmire faces an icy hell in this New York Times bestseller from the author of Land of Wolves
Well-read and world-weary, Sheriff Walt Longmire has been maintaining order in Wyoming's Absaroka County for more than thirty years, but in this riveting seventh outing, he is pushed to his limits.
Raynaud Shade, an adopted Crow Indian rumored to be one of the country's most dangerous sociopaths, has just confessed to murdering a boy ten years ago and burying him deep within the Bighorn Mountains. Walt is asked to transport Shade through a blizzard to the site, but what begins as a typical criminal transport turns personal when the veteran lawman learns that he knows the dead boy's family. Guided only by Indian mysticism and a battered paperback of Dante's Inferno, Walt braves the icy hell of the Cloud Peak Wilderness Area, cheating death to ensure that justice--both civil and spiritual--is served.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of Johnson's stellar seventh novel featuring Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire (after Junkyard Dogs), Walt and his deputy, Santiago "Sancho" Saizarbitoria, are escorting a trio of convicts through the Bighorn Mountains to meet a convoy of federal agents and sheriffs from neighboring counties. They must determine who gets jurisdiction over a newly opened cold case: one of the convicts, Raynaud Shade, recently confessed to burying the body of a Native American boy, a relative of Walt's friend and spiritual guide, Virgil White Buffalo, in the mountains years earlier. When Shade, who's headed for death row in Utah, escapes and takes off into the wilderness with a blizzard threatening, Walt sets off alone on the killer's trail, despite Sancho's warnings that Shade is leading him into a trap. Soon Walt is past the point of no return as the snow and ice accumulate on a journey that evokes Dante's Inferno, the book Sancho is reading on the expedition.
Customer Reviews
A frozen hell
For fans of the "Longmire" series on A&E this story was the framework for one episode. As always, with film or TV adaptations, there is considerably more to the novel than was on the screen, though the production team gets full marks for the choices they made.
In his typical mulish stubbornness Walt pursues an escaped convict in the best tradition of 'fools rush in...', but what else would you expect?
Craig Johnson once again sets his story in such a way that secondary characters only touch briefly on the narrative. Most of the action has Longmire alone in the Bighorn range while a winter storm blasts him and the landscape. As a result, this is almost an internal monologue. His only recurring companion Virgil White Buffalo, the giant mentally ill Crow who featured as a suspect in an earlier book.
Well worth your time and effort.