(2018) Cady has been kidnapped by the man who killed her husband in Philadelphia. Then the guy takes her to the wilds of Mexico. Walt Longmire goes on a trek to find her and to kill Bidarte. He finds the lair with the help of an eccentric owner of a pink Cadillac and initially is passed off as former Dallas Cowboy Bob Lilly. Things turn violent as Walt rescues Cady and they try to escape. Eventually they are trapped in the desert by Bidarte and it comes down to a bullfight-like knife fight that almost ends both of them. But a half-blinded Walt prevails and all is well, with Bidarte and most of his evil crew dead.KIRKUS REVIEWAn extended battle for kin and spirit in the Mexican desert.This 14th installment of Johnson's Longmire series follows Absaroka County's redoubtable sheriff, Walt Longmire, deep into the Chihuahuan desert in search of his daughter, Cady, who has been kidnapped by Tom?s Bidarte, the head of a drug cartel and a very bad guy. After a preliminary skirmish with American authorities, who try to restrain him from entering Mexico, Longmire acquires a band of companions and sets off across a forbidding landscape, hoping to reach Bidarte's stronghold before Cady is killed. In a nice early episode, Longmire is passed off to a Mexican colonel as Bob Lilly, the Dallas Cowboy star; other obstacles are not so easily overcome, and as Longmire nears his objective, the dead mount. Several characters warn Longmire that he will need to be ruthless to succeed, but even as the dead accumulate, Longmire adheres to his own moral code. He refrains from killing expat David Culpepper, one of Bidarte's lieutenants, when he has the opportunity because Culpepper is at his mercy, and the contrast between Bidarte's amoral readiness to kill for little or no reason and Longmire's reluctance to take a life if not compelled to do so is possibly overdrawn. The action spans a few days around the D?a de los Muertos, which provides somewhat stereotypical opportunities for masked shenanigans and drink-addled confusion. Longmire himself is a nice creation, as ready with a reference to antiquity or a quote from literature as he is handy in a brawl; his allies are satisfyingly varied and colorful, and the bad guys are ruthless and unprincipled. This is a rip-roaring adventure, and if Longmire seems uncannily able to recover from blows to the head and other injuries that would disable a lesser man, well, that's what it takes to defeat this "monster among monsters."The sheriff as the spirit of Quixote, riding a mule to the rescue.Pub Date: Sept. 4th, 2018ISBN: 978-0-525-52247-8Page count: 304ppPublisher: VikingReview Posted Online: July 17th, 2018Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1st, 2018

I kind of wish I had not wasted my time on this one. I knew I would not like it and read it out of obligation to get to the next one. I read Longmire for the mystery and the characters. This book read like a C-level Lee Child. If I wanted to read a Jack Reacher book, I would have. I understand authors want to try new things, but it just didn't work for me.

I know my own expectations probably put an unfair cloud over the whole story and I accept that. From the reviews of the next book it looks like we get back to the mysteries and I am looking forward to reading it. ( )

This was a deeply disappointing book. By the end of it, I was angry with Longmire.

The confrontation between Longmire and Bedart, the Mexican crime lord and his American second in command, Culpepper, has been coming for some time now.

Both men have demonstrated that they are vicious killers and that they have a personal vendetta against Longmire. They've knifed his partner, taking away her ability to have children and killing the child she was carrying. They've executed his son-in-law and they've kidnapped his daughter, sending Longmire a one-word instruction: 'Come'

Longmire, being Longmire, sees this as a burden that he must shoulder alone and heads off to Mexico with a plan that seems to consist of four words: Get My Daughter Back

He's a brave man and he's willing to sacrifice himself to save his daughter.

He's also a man who is lying to himself about what needs to be done. It's clear that, even if, by some miracle, he gets his daughter back, his family and friends will not be safe until he kills Bedart and Culpepper. I'm sure that, at some level, he knows this but it doesn't fit with his finely-honed self-image of the honourable lawman with a huge capacity for violence which he keeps in check because that's what makes him a civilised man.

So he turns up in Mexico to rescue his daughter from a hill fortress, run by a man with a small army at his command and who is waiting for Longmire to arrive. He has no plan, no resources and no ability to speak the language. He's left the people who would be best able to help him behind, so he can be the lone noble knight on a doomed quest to rescue the fair maiden. His thinking is infantile and pointlessly reckless.

I could probably have written that off as 'That's just how Longmire is' if he had continued on alone but even he can see that that won't work, so he recruits local allies along the way. Each time, he absolves himself in advance for any bad things that might happen by saying that they don't need to come all the way with him and then lets them shoulder the crazy risks anyway.

He still has no plan. He provides almost no leadership. He's big on bravery and compassion but short on practicalities.

His biggest failing is that he demonstrates that he is a man who knows everything about guns except when he needs to use them to kill someone.

His dishonesty about the real nature of his mission means that he lets people live who he should have killed, sometimes more than once. The consequence of his clear conscience is that some of the people helping him get killed unnecessarily.

Eventually, Longmire reaches the point where he can, in good conscience, kill the men who have, since the beginning, needed to be killed but by then some of his allies are dead because he didn't act sooner.

The rest of the book was pretty standard Longmire fare. He tackles impossible odds through a mixture of bravery, physical endurance and improvisation while occasionally losing himself to visions or delusions and offering up literary quotes and obscure historical details.

It's well done and the twists and turns keep the story moving forward.

I wasn't convinced by the depiction of Mexico or the Mexicans helping Longmire. Everything felt too brightly painted and too cartoonish to be real. Did the Spanish woman who helps him have to be so spectacularly beautiful? Did she have to be naked the first time she saves Longmire's life? Did the action have to take place on the Day Of The Dead? Did the escape vehicle have to be a pink vintage Cadillac convertible with bull horns on the hood rather than an SUV?

Anyway, I hope this plot arc is now at an end and Longmire can go back to being a Sherriff in Wyoming. I've had enough of him playing cowboy. ( )

I pretty much threw myself into DEPTH OF WINTER, the latest Longmire book, when I got a copy of it. The best time of the year is when a new Walt Longmire book is released. I was thrilled that this book returns to the vendetta story arch. Walt Longmire is once again facing off the man that has caused him and his family lots of grievances over the years. If you have read the previous book do you already know this since the man in question kidnapped Walts daughter Cady at the end of that book. Walt will do anything to get Cady back! The only drawback is that there was not very much space over for Henry Standing-Bear and Vic Moretti as Walt used new resources to find Cady in Mexico. Still, they are there when Walt needs them.


READ THE REST OF THE REVIEW OVER AT FRESH FICTION! ( )

I enjoyed listening to this but it wasn't a favorite. Im kind of tired of this storyline. The stuff Walt went through in this one and lived was a little unbelievable. I really hope this bad guy is really dead this time. ( )