This month’s MysteryPeople pick is Craig Johnson’s new Walt Longmire novel, Hell is Empty. Craig will be at BookPeople speaking and signing Hell is Empty on Thursday, June 16th, 7p. Scott, MysteryPeople‘s Crime Fiction Coordinator, recently read the novel and loved it. Here’s his review, as well as a video of Scott talking about the book.
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Craig Johnson has been able to pull off something only the great writers can do: write a series that is fresh and original every time. For six books concerning widowed sheriff Walt Longmire and his relationship with Absoroka County, Wyoming, where he serves, Craig has always delivered the humor, humanity and colorful characters we’ve come to expect. He subtly moves through the subgenres of mystery, occasionally mixing in elements of the thriller and western that illuminate different facets of the man. In Hell Is Empty, he uses the adventure story and a heaping helping of Dante’s Inferno to give us more Walt Longmire.
Walt has to help the FBI escort three prisoners up in The Big Horn Mountains where ten years ago Raynaud Shade, the most dangerous of the three, buried a boy he killed. When the three escape and take an agent hostage, it’s up to Walt to track them down. His only guides are a copy of Inferno, the murdered boy’s uncle, and Virgil White Buffalo, the homeless Crow Indian Johnson fans will remember from Another Man’s Moccasin’s.
Johnson uses the action adventure genre to its fullest. The forward momentum of this book is like no other he’s written, and the book contains some of his best action scenes yet. Most effective are the references to Dante’s work, from which he derives much of the story’s humor and which he also uses to help us look at Walt’s spirituality. In fact, the story is a look at broken spirituality with Virgil, Walt, and their adversary. While Johnson doesn’t give them a contrived moment of seeing the light, he gets Walt to one of his most poignant moments on the last page.
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