Western Police Procedural Fiction

When an elderly local woman is found poisoned, Sheriff Walt Longmire begins an investigation that soon has him ensnared in a deadly spider's web. From Craig Johnson, author of the acclaimed novel The Cold Dish, comes this enthralling Sheriff Longmire mystery. With a distinctive literary flair, Johnson leads us into the wide open space of Absaroka County, Wyoming.

"It' s a question of what you have to do, what you have to live with if you don't." Sheriff Walt Longmire is reading A Christmas Carol in his office on December 24th when he's interrupted by the ghost of Christmas past: a young woman with a hairline scar across her forehead and more than a few questions about Walt' s predecessor, Lucian Connally. Walt doesn' t recognize the mystery woman, but she seems to know him and claims to have something she must return to Connally.

Jon Talbot is a history professor who makes sense of the past by examining facts. He also knows how to speculate about the what-ifs. Jon’s doing both following the death of his wife, Pax. Driving home late from a volunteer assignment, she plunged off a mountain highway and died. The police find nothing suspicious about the facts: a deer in the road, a blown tire, a broken neck. But the what-ifs are leading Jon down a twisting trail of secrets. After five years of marriage, he is finally getting to know his wife.

It's April, but there's still snow on the Montana mountains the day a member of the Madison River Liar and Fly Tiers club finds a Santa hat in the chimney of his rented cabin. With the flue clogged, and desperate to make a fire, he climbs up to the roof only to find the body of a teenage girl wedged into the chimney.

Barely a month since his promotion to Inspector, DI Ford is called in to investigate the murder of a young nurse and her son in a small flat in Salisbury. There are few clues, and no apparent motive, but Ford can sense that there's a serial killer at work. After all, he knows from brutal personal experience how killers cover their tracks.... It's been six years since Ford lost his wife in a climbing accident - an accident he caused. He is desperate to keep the truth hidden, especially from his son, Sam.

In Montana's Gravelly Range, paw prints and a single whisker discovered at a scene of horrific violence suggest a woman has been attacked and carried away by a mountain lion. Sheriff Martha Ettinger employs her fiancé, sometimes-detective Sean Stranahan, to put a name to the gnawed bones comprising all that is left of the body. The woman's is the first of several deaths that Sean suspects are not as easily explained as they appear.

The death of Sylvia Kaye figured dramatically in Thursday afternoon's edition of the Oxford Mail. By Friday evening Inspector Morse had informed the nation that the police were looking for a dangerous man - facing charges of willful murder, sexual assault and rape. But as the obvious leads fade into twilight and darkness, Morse becomes more and more convinced that passion holds the key....

Detective Norman is out of retirement and back on the beat in a rainy Welsh seaside town. Llangwelli might be short on sunshine, but it's certainly not short on murders . . . Norman may seem a bit old-fashioned, but he's always willing to learn from his band of misfit recruits. A battered body. A missing handbag. A false confession? The call comes on Monday afternoon. About to demolish a row of derelict cottages, workmen discover a body in the bedroom of Number 9. A young woman, expensively dressed in designer clothes. It's a mystery what she was doing there.

When Lolo Long's niece, Jaya, begins receiving death threats, Tribal Police Chief Long calls on Absaroka County Sheriff Walt Longmire along with Henry Standing Bear as lethal backup. Jaya Longshot Long is the phenom of the Lame Deer Lady Stars High School basketball team and is following in the steps of her older sister, who disappeared a year previously, a victim of the scourge of missing Native Woman in Indian Country.

Kate Fox has just defeated her ex-husband in the race for Grand County sheriff, but there’s no time for celebration. Instead, she’s called to the railroad tracks just outside of town. The train engineer is dead. His conductor is in shock. And Kate’s gut is telling her this is much more than just a horrific accident. The victim's widow is behaving oddly. The neighbor’s story doesn’t add up. The victim had recently made several enemies - and they all have motive for murder.

It was meant to be a harmless stag-night prank. A few hours later, four of his best friends are dead, and Michael Harrison has disappeared. With only three days to the wedding, Detective Superintendent Grace - a man haunted by the shadow of his own missing wife - is contacted by Michael's beautiful, distraught fiancée, Ashley Harper. Grace discovers that the one man who ought to know Michael Harrison's whereabouts is saying nothing. But then, he has a lot to gain - more than anyone realizes.

Sheriff Jed Morgan thinks his life is about to get a lot quieter when he gets voted out of office in a bought-and-paid for election rigged by his family’s long-time nemesis Arnie Williams. But when the new railroad comes to town and Jed’s neighbors, the Crawfords at the Bar C ranch, have their water poisoned and Arnie Williams’ hands try to stampede their cattle, Jed begins to find that his lawman days were far from over.

After a career in Army Intelligence, Porter Beck is back in Nevada and doing the same lawman’s job his father once did. His sparsely populated jurisdiction is usually very quiet. But on the night of July 4, Sheriff Beck sees a strange light streak across the dark sky. He prays it won’t crash in drought-stricken Lincoln County, where the wildfires are already burning. But it does, and the resultant explosion triggers an avalanche of death and destruction in the high desert, impacting Beck’s oldest friend, the community at large, and even his sister, Brinley.

It’s late evening when the Regional Control Centre receives a mysterious 999 call. No one speaks, but the call location is somewhere along a narrow, hardly used tree-lined stretch of road that leads nowhere. With no uniformed officers free to investigate, they pass the call on to DC Judy Lane at Llangwelli station. Lane informs DS Norman Norman who, concerned it may be a trap, agrees to meet her at the scene. But when Norman arrives, he finds a dead motorcyclist sitting against a tree, and the young detective unconscious nearby.

Craig Johnson's Walt Longmire mysteries are critically acclaimed. Longmire's third outing takes him from Wyoming to Philadelphia to investigate a brutal assault on his daughter, Cady. Walt believes her ex-boyfriend is behind the crime and searches him out. But when he turns up dead, Walt is back to square one.

When Kevin Kerney, deputy chief of the New Mexico State Police, inherits an unexpected windfall of 6,400 acres of high-county land, the last thing he wants to think about is work. But while visiting his new property, he comes across an ailing stray dog that leads him to the butchered bones of a murder victim near the rugged mountain of Hermit's Peak.

It's an ordinary Tuesday morning when pensioner Alun Edwards turns up at Llangwelli station. He doesn't want to make a fuss but he's worried about his friend Gareth. Every Monday, they meet up for a game of chess. But Gareth wasn't at home yesterday. He's not answering his phone—and he's left his dog behind. He'd never do that. Detective Norman searches Gareth's cottage—and finds a woman's photograph, torn to shreds and dumped in the bin.

A cold night, in the middle of nowhere, in a vast county in New Mexico, a lone patrolwoman comes across a pair of dead cops sitting in their cruiser. And who does she find standing over their corpses? A giant, lone drifter with one stark trait; he is menacing like a nightmare. His name? Jack Widow. To find the real killer, she'll have to partner with Widow. What seems like an ambush and execution might turn out to be something conspiratorial and far more sinister.

Attempting to recover from his harrowing experiences in Mexico, in Land of Wolves Wyoming Sheriff Walt Longmire is neck deep in the investigation of what could or could not be the suicidal hanging of a shepherd. With unsettling connections to a Basque family with a reputation for removing the legs of Absaroka County sheriffs, matters become even more complicated with the appearance of an oversize wolf in the Big Horn Mountains to which Walt finds himself feeling more and more empathetic.

When the sheriff is murdered, his son is asked to take his place. Bobby Trent is a semi-retired rodeo cowboy and the son of a highly respected law officer. When his father, the sheriff, is murdered, Trent is asked to fulfill the remaining months of his term in office. Sheriff Bobby Trent; nobody would have guessed it, but it should be an easy enough task; drink a little coffee, maybe lead a parade. Easy work until he is healthy enough to return to the circuit.