The Western Star
An exciting instalment of the best-selling, award-winning series - now a hit Netflix show!
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
In the thirteenth novel in Craig Johnson's beloved New York Times bestselling Longmire series - now a hit Netflix series - Sheriff Walt Longmire faces a head-on collision of past and present, placing him and everyone he cares about squarely on the tracks of runaway revenge.
Sheriff Walt Longmire is enjoying a celebratory beer after a weapons certification at the Wyoming Law Enforcement Academy when a younger sheriff confronts him with a photograph of twenty-five armed men standing in front of a Challenger steam locomotive.
It takes him back to when, fresh from the battlefields of Vietnam, then-deputy Walt accompanied his mentor Lucian to the annual Wyoming Sheriff's Association junket held on the excursion train known as 'the Western Star', which ran the length of Wyoming from Cheyenne to Evanston and back.
Armed with his trusty Colt .45 and a paperback of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, the young Walt was ill-prepared for the machinations of twenty-four veteran sheriffs, let alone the cavalcade of curious characters that accompanied them.
The photograph-along with an upcoming parole hearing for one of the most dangerous men Walt has encountered in a lifetime of law enforcement-hurtles the sheriff into a head-on collision of past and present, placing him and everyone he cares about squarely on the tracks of runaway revenge.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Johnson pays homage to Agatha Christie in his cleverly plotted 13th Walt Longmire novel (after 2016's An Obvious Fact), which takes place in both the past and the present. In 1972, Walt, an Absaroka County deputy and newly returned Vietnam War vet, joins his boss, Sheriff Lucian Connelly, for the Wyoming Sheriffs' Association annual excursion across the state aboard the steam train Western Star. In Walt's pocket is a copy of Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. On the train, Walt attracts the attention of Kim LeClerc, the comely companion of Sheriff George McKay, who warns the deputy to stay away from her. Soon afterward, during a station stop, someone knocks Walt out just as he's about to reboard the train. Walt hitches a ride to the next stop, where he learns that McKay has disappeared and another sheriff has been shot dead. In the present day, Walt is opposed to the release of a serial killer, who's dying and has been imprisoned for decades, for a personal reason that will catch readers by surprise. Witty dialogue abounds; when Kim asks Walt if he killed many babies in Vietnam, he replies, "Hardly any, they're small Hard to hit." And Johnson winds up the whodunit with a solution that Christie could never have imagined. 15-city author tour.
Customer Reviews
Every part Works
This is the writing hitting all the marks with precision. I would recommend reading a few earlier instalments & indeed reading the whole series for this to have maximum impact. Could you read this as a standalone probably but I don’t think it would quite have the same impact.