The first chapter filled with the dry, quiet, patient, gentle humour of the long friendship between Walt Longmire and Henry Standingbear as they try to find a new location for Katie's wedding when the venue on the Reservation becomes unavailable at the last minute.

There's a strong sense of place, a feeling of family and the easy companionship that comes from doing something important but not too challenging. Then, just as I was relaxing with Walt and Henry, taking in the beauty of the landscape, they see someone die and everything changes.

For me, this captures the spirit of the Longmire stories: men doing their best, taking their ease where they can but always keeping a weather eye for the next piece of misery the world will throw their way.

In 'Hell Is Empty' Craig Johnson has attempted something very ambitious and done it pretty well but I hope he doesn't feel the need to do it again.

Unlike its predecessors, 'Hell Is Empty' doesn't have a mystery at its heart. We know from the beginning who the bad guys are, even if we don't know exactly why they're doing what they're doing. The FBI have, for various plausible reasons that they'll kick themselves for later, transported some very bad men into the Wyoming mountains just before a major ice storm (Hey, it's May, what did you expect at that altitude?). Of course, things go wrong, people die and the rest of the book is about Walt's relentless, lone pursuit of the men up the mountain in the storm.

At the beginning, this reads like a relatively normal hunt-the-bad-guys plot, with Walt at the centre bringing his unique mix of dry wit, erudite commentary, dogged determination and decisive action to the chase.

Then, as Walt gets tired, the altitude climbs and the weather gets worse, we move into something that feels more like a Vision Quest. It's not clear whether Walt is being guided by a real person (a character we met in a previous book) or by a spirit guide appearing as that person or whether Walt is just hallucinating as his refusal to give up bumps into the physical effects of hypothermia.

I think Craig Johnson does a splendid job of walking this is it real or isn't it line while keeping the tension high, the action constant and still finding time for to share Walt's reflections on Dante's 'inferno' and the idea that the worst hell is in the mind and Walt's deep understanding of how a monster like the man he is chasing is created and the terrible harm that he does.

The final scene at the top of the mountain is beautifully done. It's dramatic, visually stunning and works as a conclusion to both the mystical and the material explanations of Walt's quest.

The epilogue was also very distinctive. It went beyond the 'let's wrap up the loose ends and finish on a positive note' scope of the traditional epilogue and showed that Walt can't just shrug off his experience and step back into his old life. That rang true to me and I admired it.

BUT...

Although I could see that this was both a bold book to write and that it was well written, it wasn't as much fun as usual. Walt's head is a fascinating place to visit but an exhausting place to live in. In the books so far, Walt has been supported by a cast of interesting characters who aid or obstruct him in solving mysteries and bringing the bad guys to justice. In 'Hell Is Empty' we have nearly half a book that is Walt all the time and I found it tiring.

So, I'm hoping book eight, 'As The Crow Flies' brings me back to more familiar, less ambitious territory that's easier for me to enjoy.

Still, I recognise that, as is the way with Spirit Quests, the Walt who came down the mountain is not the same Walt who went up it and I'm intrigued to see how that change will manifest in future stories.

"Junkyard Dogs" is one of my favourite Longmire stories because, after "Another Man's Moccasin's" where we spent most of our time learning about Longmire's youthful experiences in Vietnam and "The Dark Horse" where we left Longmire's town and Longmire himself behind as he went undercover, "Junkyard Dogs" brought us back to the roots of the series: the life of a beleaguered small-town Sheriff dealing with the feuds, follies and felonies of larger-than-life characters in Durant, Wyoming.

This is a fun book that, even though it's mostly betrayal and murder and the long reach of organised crime, is dominated by benign, compassionate humour.

The opening incident of the book pretty much sets the tone for the whole thing. As usual, we're dropped straight into the action and, as usual, neither what is going on nor Sheriff Longmire's reaction to it are what you might expect.

“I tried to get a straight answer from his grandson and granddaughter-in-law as to why their grandfather had been tied with a hundred feet of nylon rope to the rear bumper of the 1968 Oldsmobile Toronado.“

This bizarre incident introduces us to the Stewart clan who run the local dump. They are drawn with care and affection, even though they often behave in ways that are at best reckless and, at worst show the kind of stupidity that would qualify them for a Darwin Award. These are real people, not just bizarre characters whipped up to provide a laugh at those strange people who live out in the boonies. Walt treats them with respect and compassion, except when one or more of them is trying to kill him.

There is a solid plot here that is more complicated than it at first appears to be and it's unravelled by patient police work rather than sudden insight. Along the way we get a character-driven picture of day-to-day policing in a small-town, at least day-to-day policing in a small town where the Sheriff is a man who doesn't jump to conclusions, doesn't give up on his people and who maintains his sense of humour even when confronting terrible behaviour with tragic consequences.

Sheriff Longmire perhaps takes longer than he might have done to work out what was going on and seems always to be at least one step behind the bad guys, but he get there in the end and he manages to do it in a way that shows him to be a kind man who is eternally hopeful that people might rescue themselves from their anger, greed and stupidity.

As usual, my experience of the book was greatly enhanced by George Guidall's great narration. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample of his magic.

https://soundcloud.com/audiofilemagazine/junkyard-dogs-by-craig-johnson

It’s hard to think of a place in Wyoming where the wind doesn’t reign supreme; where the sovereignty of sound doesn’t break through the parks of the Bighorns with a hoarse-throated howl. I sometimes wonder if the trees miss the wind in the infrequent moments when it dies down, when the air is still and the skies are a threadbare blue, thin and stretching above the mountains. Needled courtesans—the lodgepole pines, Douglas firs, and Engelmann spruce—stand at the edge of the great park like wallflowers awaiting the beseeching hand of the wind to invite them to the dance floor. And I can’t help but wonder that when the sway passes and the trees are still, do they pine for that wind; do they grieve?

Ahhh...it's good to be back in Absaroka County.

Walt starts off investigating the death of a sheep—probably at the hands, er, teeth of a wolf. This wolf is likely from Yellowstone and kicked out of his pack. Now that he's probably/possibly killed a sheep, it certainly appears to be open season for him soon. Oddly, there's no sign of a shepherd for this dead sheep, which gets Walt and Vic to go looking.

Sadly, they find the shepherd hanging from a tree—possibly the loneliness of the Wyoming wilderness got to him, or maybe he was killed. Neither case looks easy to wrap up, which means that it's time for Walt to get back to focus more on the job and less on recovery from the horrible injuries (physical and mental) sustained in Mexico.

Walt is largely ready for this kind of thing, he needs something to focus on. He has to first deal with a labor and wildlife advocate who knew both the wolf and shepherd, and she doesn't trust Walt's approach to either. There's also the shepherd's employer—a member of the same family that left then-Sheriff Lucian Connally without a leg. There's a populace worried about the presence of wolves in the area (ignoring the fact that there's only one that's been seen). Also, Henry adds the possibility that this wolf is actually a messenger from the spirits with a vision for Walt. Lastly, the entire Sheriff's department wonders how long it'll be until Walt does something to endanger his life—and just how bad that'll be.

Most dramatically, a computer is installed on Walt's desk, "the slippery slope to a cell phone." Despite this intrusion of the 1990's into his life, Walt perseveres.

This brings Walt back to Absaroka, he hasn't spent a novel here since 2015's Dry Bones (it doesn't feel like it's been that long), and the citizens are aware he's spending a lot of time away. We see the old regulars, which should make long-time fans happy. But best of all, the story is classic Longmire—an exploration of Wyoming's past and future just as much as it is the past and future of the characters (regulars and new to the series).

Early on, Walt's on an unexpected hike and it's taking it's toll:

I pushed off the tree and started back at a slow pace, wondering if I ’d ever pick up the step I'd lost in Mexico. Maybe that was the way of things; sometimes you paid a price and never get to make another deposit into your account and eventually you are overdrawn. Lately, I’d been feeling like I was standing at the counter, the cashier always closing the window in my face.

That neatly summed up my fears about the series in general, particularly how it'd work after Mexico. If the series was going to continue in the vein of Depth of Winter, I'd have a hard time sticking around. But I'm happy to say that while the effects of Mexico linger, and will continue to be felt for some time, I'm not going anywhere. There were repeated signals throughout this novel that the status quo shouldn't be taken for granted when it comes to any of these characters (except maybe Henry, he'll only change when he wants to), but the same things that have been drawing readers to Walt Longmire for 15 books are still at the character's and series' core.

Leaving the state of the series aside, this was one of my favorite installments in the series (sure, I might be extra generous given my fears after Depth of Winter). The characters shone—it's one of Sancho's best outings, and Vic was just great. The story was compelling, a great mix of a drama and comedic moments, and the mystery was satisfying (maybe a little easy to suss out for the reader, but Johnson hit every beat correctly). I'm already counting the days until #16.

So, when you're on the fifth book about an ageing sheriff in a small town in Wyoming, how do you keep things fresh?

You make him become someone else and move him to a different small town and you give him a daunting mission: to prove that the person in his cell, who confessed to murdering her husband, didn't do it.

The plot in this book takes a little more suspension of disbelief than I'm used to but it was clever, mostly plausible and had some smart twists that I didn't see coming.

But this wasn't a book I read for the plot. I sat back and let myself fall under the spell of the storytelling, the quality of the writing and the skill with which Craig Johnson makes the people and the places seem real.

The story is not told in an entirely linear fashion. At the start, we don't know why Walt is there or what his agenda is. We get glimpses of an earlier timeline, with Walt being Walt in his own town, dealing with a prisoner sent to him as an overflow from the Sheriff in the next County but we don't know how the stories connect. The Dark Horse idea crops up frequently usually applied in a new way and or to a new person. The plot is a puzzle which Walt doesn't yet have all the pieces for, although the part of the plot that made me raise an eyebrow was how you go undercover one county over in a town that seems to have a population of about thirty.

The writing reflects Walt's odd mix of patience and passion, logic and intuition and his dryly humorous self-awareness. It's easy on the ear yet it's tightly focused and well-executed.

The people in this story are new, apart from Walt and Henry. I liked the empathy with which the undocumented single mother, the old and almost worn out cowboy, the rancher who is selling up and shipping out and the little boy who still believes in heroes were presented. They were more than plot devices but they also brought the plot alive.I liked the feel for the semi-desert landscape, for a life spent raising horses and for living in a town that doesn't have any life any more.

That was enough for me. This may not have been the strongest Longmire book but its fed me and made me hungry for more. Book six is already on my TBR pile.