New Large Print Westerns

Winter Counts is a groundbreaking thriller from David Heska Wanbli Weiden about "a vigilante on a Native American reservation who embarks on a dangerous mission to track down the source of a heroin influx. Virgil Wounded Horse is the local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.  When justice is denied by the American legal system or the tribal council, Virgil is hired to deliver his own punishment, the kind that’s hard to forget. But when heroin makes its way into the reservation and finds Virgil’s nephew, his vigilantism suddenly becomes personal. He enlists the help of his ex-girlfriend and sets out to learn where the drugs are coming from, and how to make them stop. They follow a lead to Denver and find that drug cartels are rapidly expanding and forming new and terrifying alliances. And back on the reservation, a new tribal council initiative raises uncomfortable questions about money and power. As Virgil starts to link the pieces together, he must face his own demons and reclaim his Native identity. He realizes that being a Native American in the twenty-first century comes at an incredible cost." (from Amazon.com)

The new novel in the beloved New York Times bestselling Longmire series by Craig Johnson is called Next to Last Stand. One of the most viewed paintings in American history, Custer's Last Fight, copied and distributed by Anheuser-Busch at a rate of over two million copies a year, was destroyed in a fire at the 7th Cavalry Headquarters in Fort Bliss, Texas, in 1946. Or was it? When Charley Lee Stillwater dies of an apparent heart attack at the Wyoming Home for Soldiers & Sailors, Walt Longmire is called in to try and make sense of a piece of a painting and a Florsheim shoebox containing a million dollars, sending the good sheriff on the trail of a dangerous art heist." (from Amazon.com)

The latest Aaron Mackey western by Terrence McCauley is called The Dark Sunrise. U.S. Marshal Aaron Mackey and his steadfast deputy Billy Sunday are more than ready to see crime boss James Grant and his murderous cronies stand trial for the mayhem and suffering they have wrought upon the citizens of Dover Station, Montana. With Montana’s statehood fast approaching, cruel and murderous men like Grant can no longer be tolerated in positions of power. Unfortunately, the bigwigs in Helena follow their own set of laws and allow Grant to go free. They also give peacekeeping authority to Colonel Nathan Rigg, Mackey’s former commanding officer during the war. Rigg is just as sadistic and bloodthirsty as Grant, but it seems that Helena’s leaders prefer to keep killers like these under their thumbs, but Mackey and Billy know there is no controlling these monsters and they may just have to appoint themselves judge, jury, and executioners. 

The latest Slash and Pecos Western by William W. Johnstone and J.A. Johnstone is A Good Day for a Massacre. For Jimmy “Slash” Braddock and Melvin “the Pecos River Kid” Baker, life on the straight and narrow is not always easy, but they are determined to make an honest go of it. Their sometime employer, U.S. Marshal Bledsoe, asks them to pick up a shipment of gold from a mining town in the Sawatch Range. A ruthless gang has other ideas for that gold, however, and they ambush Slash and Pecos. Not ones to back down from a fight, the two reprobates go after the bandits and they have a little extra help. A lady Pinkerton named Hatty Friendly—though she’s anything but—is also determined to recover the gold, even if that means teaming up with these two ornery old coots. 

In Luck and a Horse: A Western Duo by Max Brand, both stories center on cowardice. The titular character in “Traynor” is thought by everyone to be weak because he let Dr. Parker Channing steal his love, Rose Laymon, away from him. When the stage he is driving is robbed and his best friend and stage guard, Sam Whitney, is killed, Traynor chases the thief and recovers the man’s dropped Stetson, which was sold to Dr. Channing less than a month earlier. Traynor confronts Channing and the man takes off, but Traynor gives chase even with his physical weakness threatening to overwhelm him. In “Luck and a Horse,” Tommy Grant works on the farm of tyrant and master manipulator Sylvester Train—who hasn’t paid Tommy in nineteen months. Tommy balks when Train orders him to use his horse, Brownie, to plow. Instead, Tommy is sent to Fruit Dale with two wagons of grain and a shopping list. Tommy finds himself in a back room of the saloon playing cards with jailbird Bert Ellis who is in the sites of gunslinger Lefty Lew Hilton. When Ellis is shot in the middle of the poker game, Tommy finds himself on the run from a hundred posse men who have mistaken him as the killer. 

New Mystery Fiction

Rosemary Simpson delivers another Gilded Age Mystery with Death Brings a Shadow. Prudence MacKenzie and former Pinkerton Geoffrey Hunter take a private yacht bound for The Sea Islands along the coast of Georgia. Prudence is the maid of honor for her beast friend Eleanor Dickson who is to wed a Southern gentleman Teddy Bennett. Just days before the wedding the bride is missing. The frantic search of Bradford Island turns up poor Eleanor’s corpse in an alligator-infested swamp. Prudence is beside herself but gathers her wits when she and Geoffrey find evidence that Eleanor was held under the water purposefully. The pair navigate a morass of voodoo spells and dark secrets left from the days of slavery. Can they bring a killer to justice before anyone else dies? 

The latest Meg Langslow mystery by Donna Andrews is called The Falcon Always Wings Twice. Meg’s grandmother Cordelia has decided to host a Renaissance Faire at her craft center and puts the whole family to work: Meg handles the blacksmithing, Michael and the boys perform, and everyone dresses in full regalia. Meg’s grandfather, however, is most excited to spend time with the fair’s falconer and his hunting birds—the peregrine falcon and a red-tailed hawk. He’s also concerned about the birds’ well-being with all of the hullabaloo surrounding the fair, so he appoints himself their protector. One of the actors performing at the fair is found dead and, because the man was suspected of mistreating one of the falcons, Grandfather is one of the main suspects. Meg and company will have to beat the bushes for clues to clear Grandfather’s name and catch the real killer. 

M.C. Beaton’s latest Agatha Raisin novel is called Hot to Trot. Private investigator Agatha learns that her friend and one-time lover Sir Charles Fraith is to be married to a horrible woman. She takes it upon herself to do a bit of digging to find out what she can about the socialite but comes up empty. Naturally, Agatha crashes the wedding—out of selfless concern for Charles, of course. The public altercation is embarrassing for everyone, but just when Agatha thinks things can’t get worse, she hears a scream for the stables on the property and rushes to check it out. What she discovers is a murder and she and Sir Charles are the prime suspects. Some shifty evidence surfaces that seems to seal Charles’s fate and Agatha jumps into action to keep her friend from losing his ancestral home, his entire estate, and his freedom. On top of everything else, Agatha’s ex-husband is back in Carsely and wanting back into her heart. What is a girl to do? 

The Right Sort of Man is a mystery by Allison Montclair. As London is slowly recovering from World War II, two very different women come together to launch the Right Sort Marriage Bureau. The quick-witted and impulsive Iris Sparks, and the practical widow with a young son Gwendolyn Bainbridge are determined to achieve some independence and do some good in the rapidly changing world. Their promising start is threatened, however, when their newest client—Tillie La Salle—is found murdered and the man arrested for crime is the prospective husband they matched her with. The police are convinced of the man’s guilt, but Miss Sparks and Mrs. Bainbridge are not. In order to clear his name and rescue their business’s reputation, the two decide to do some sleuthing of their own. They use all the skills and contacts they’ve each acquired through their lives as well as their individual adventures during the recent war to find a killer. What they don’t know is that they are putting themselves in grave danger. 

Next to Last Stand is Craig Johnson’s latest Walt Longmire mystery. One of the most viewed paintings in American History is Custer’s Last Fight. Anheuser-Busch copied and distributed the painting at a rate of more than a million copies a year, but the original was destroyed in a fire at the Seventh Calvary headquarters in Fort Bliss, Texas in 1946. Or was it? When Charley Lee Stillwater apparently dies of a heart attack at the Veterans’ Home of Wyoming, Walt is called in to try and make sense of a partial painting and a shoebox containing one million dollars. Both were found in Stillwater’s footlocker. Walt is fond of the veterans who sit outside and wave at passing cars, and he felt a particular kinship to Charley which makes the puzzle more pressing in Walt’s mind. As he tracks down the providence of the painting and the source of the money, he encounters some dangerous characters along the way. Walt will have to make sure that this investigation doesn’t become his own last stand. 

What I’m Reading

Author Craig Johnson introduces Sheriff Walt Longmire of Wyoming’s Absaroka County in The Cold Dish. Johnson draws on his deep attachment to the American West to produce a literary mystery of stunning authenticity, and full of memorable characters. After twenty-five years as sheriff of Absaroka County, Walt Longmire’s hopes of finishing out his tenure in peace are dashed when Cody Pritchard is found dead near the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Two years earlier, Cody has been one of four high school boys given suspended sentences for raping a local Cheyenne girl. Somebody, it would seem, is seeking vengeance, and Longmire might be the only thing standing between the three remaining boys and a Sharps .45-70 rifle. With lifelong friend Henry Standing Bear, Deputy Victoria Moretti, and a cast of characters both tragic and humorous enough to fill in the vast emptiness of the high plains, Walt Longmire attempts to see that revenge, a dish best served cold, is never served at all.

 In Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton, S.T., a domesticated crow, is a bird of simple pleasures: hanging out with his owner Big Jim, trading insults with Seattle's wild crows (i.e. "those idiots"), and enjoying the finest food humankind has to offer: Cheetos ®. But when Big Jim's eyeball falls out of his head, S.T. starts to think something's not quite right. His tried-and-true remedies -- from beak-delivered beer to the slobbering affection of Big Jim's loyal but dim-witted dog, Dennis -- fail to cure Big Jim's debilitating malady. S.T. is left with no choice but to abandon his old life and venture out into a wild and frightening new world with his trusty steed Dennis, where he suddenly discovers that the neighbors are devouring one other. Local wildlife is abuzz with rumors of Seattle's dangerous new predators. Humanity's extinction has seemingly arrived, and the only one determined to save it is a cowardly crow whose only knowledge of the world comes from TV. What could possibly go wrong?

 In honor of National Poetry Month, I’m reading Unseen Poems by the widely beloved medieval Persian poet Rumi. Rumi (1207-1273) was trained in Sufism--a mystic tradition within Islam--and founded the Sufi order known to us as the Whirling Dervishes, who use dance and music as part of their spiritual devotion. Rumi's poetry has long been popular with contemporary Western audiences because of the way it combines the sacred and the sensual, describing divine love in rapturously human terms. However, a number of Rumi's English translators over the past century were not speakers of Persian and they based their sometimes very free interpretations on earlier translations. With Western audiences in mind, translators also tended to tone down or leave out elements of Persian culture and of Islam in Rumi's work, and hundreds of the prolific poet's works were never made available to English speakers at all. In this new translation -- composed almost entirely of untranslated gems from Rumi's vast ouevre -- Brad Gooch and Maryam Mortaz aim to achieve greater fidelity to the originals while still allowing Rumi's lyric exuberance to shine.

Longmire - Season 2

Walt Longmire gets a heap of trouble in the second season of the popular series on the A&E Network. First of all, he is in the midst of a heated re-election campaign against one of his own deputies--namely, Branch Connelly. Second, his daughter takes off for a few weeks without letting anyone know where she's going. Turns out that after she finds out that her mother was killed by a meth addict and not from cancer like her father told her, she goes to Denver to see what the police there know about the case. Third, we learn that Deputy Victoria "Vic" Moretti left Philadelphia under a dark cloud not of her making and it seems the cloud has found her. Then all hell breaks loose! I don't want to give too much away, so I'll just say that this is a wonderful television series that runs during the summer months on A&E and is based on a series of books by Craig Johnson. There is no mistaking that this is a modern-day western--complete with horses, cowboy hats, rodeos, and cattle rustlers. I thoroughly enjoy the characters and the actors who play them. Robert Taylor, an Aussie import, does a fine job of portraying the rough, intelligent, and caring Sheriff of Absaroka County. Lou Diamond Phillips--still as handsome as ever--plays Longmire's longtime and long suffering best friend, Henry Standing Bear. The first season was more of a way to introduce the characters; the second season goes deeper into their relationships and their pasts. While the television show is not exactly like the books by Craig Johnson, I think that it captures the spirit of Johnson's characters and of the people and places in Wyoming that are so lovingly drawn in the books.  The library owns both Season 1 and 2 of the show and it may be checked out in the audio-visual department.

Cast of Longmire (A&E Network)

Spirit of Steamboat

     Legend has it that Steamboat was the greatest bronco of all time. He never let any cowboy ride him: tough as nails. This horse was so famous that Wyoming put an image of him bucking a rider on its license plates. At least, this is the story Craig Johnson tells in his newest Walt Longmire novella. Sheriff Longmire is sitting at his desk on Christmas Eve reading A Christmas Carol by Dickens. (It's a tradition.) His under sheriff is in Brazil with her mother and his daughter is in Pennsylvania; ready to have a baby. His dispatcher, Ruby, tells him there is someone there to see him. A small wisp of a woman with porcelain skin and dark hair carrying a black garment bag walks into Walt's office and asks if he is the sheriff. She speaks to him like she knows him and she asks about the previous sheriff, Lucian Connally. Walt takes the woman to the Durant Home for Assisted Living where Lucian has just shot out the T.V. in the rec room. Lucian answers the door to his apartment wearing nothing but his boxers, a wife beater t-shirt, and only one leg. After all the pleasantries are out of the way, Lucian asks her what the reason for her visit is. She replies, "Steamboat."
    With that, we flash back to 1988 when Walt has just been elected sheriff for the first time and his daughter, Cady, was only 9 years old. Again, it is Christmas Eve and Walt is anxiously awaiting the med-evac flight of a little girl who has just lost her parents and great-aunt in a fiery car crash. There is a blizzard blowing their way and no one is sure that the helicopter carrying the severely burned girl will make it to Denver. It is slow and unable to maneuver in the high winds and icy conditions. Walt asks if the old B-25 34030 sitting in the hangar could make the trip. Yes, no, maybe is the answer he gets. Even if it could there is no one to fly it. But Walt knows someone; Lucian Connally flew one of these very planes in WWII over Japan. So, with the EMT & pilot of the med-evac helicopter refusing to fly in the gathering storm, and a little girl's life hanging in the balance; Walt enlists, Lucian, a reluctant co-pilot named Julie, and Doctor Isaac to help get the B-25 in the air and the little girl to Denver's Children's Hospital. Walt goes along for the ride, as does the little girl's grandmother; who doesn't speak any English. The harrowing ride that follows tests them all in ways they could not imagine, but the little girl gets to her destination and twenty-five years later, she comes back to Durant to get the whole story and to return a memento to Lucian. Why the mention of the bronco? The name of the plane: Steamboat.