Craig Johnson’s THE COLD DISH is the quintessential contemporary Western murder mystery. Set in rural Wyoming, it features the requisite elements: tough terrain, beautiful wilderness, a strong infusion of Amerindian beliefs and style, a respect for guns, wildlife and Average Joes trying to make a living, and the most significant cultural markers of Westernness: self-reliance and autonomy.

Sheriff Walt Longmire has been on the job in Absaroka County for a long time. He’s a town fixture, the best friend of Henry Standing Bear, who owns yet another town fixture, the Red Pony Bar, and he’s just the kind of sheriff you could run to if you were in trouble. But he’s hit a hard patch. His wife passed away a few years back, and some of the joy of living has gone out of Longmire’s daily life.

But while he’s trying to get started up again, a nasty crime comes tearing out of the past and threatens to rip open the county all over again: one that involved the gang rape by four boys of a young Cheyenne girl suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome. The perps were arrested but given a light sentence at the trial. Most of the town, and the Cheyenne, were not pleased.

Two years later, one of the boys is found with his internal organs rearranged, the result of a Sharps .45-.70 buffalo slug sent into his torso. Longmire has to find out who is serving up this cold dish of revenge, but it begins leading him into some very dangerous territory, for his friend Henry is of Cheyenne descent and related to the young girl who was attacked. And Longmire’s other friends aren’t all that upset about the boy being killed, either.

The author does a great job of depicting the Western wilderness and the people who live there, and manages to couple this with a fairly intriguing murder mystery that had me guessing all the way to the end. If you have any interest in Wyoming or the Cheyenne, you should definitely pick this up and look forward to Johnson’s next book, DEATH WITHOUT COMPANY. –Mark Rose

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