First Frost: A Longmire Mystery

“First Frost extends the Longmire legend with an interesting look into his formative years that fans of the series will enjoy.”

In the newest installment of Craig Johnson’s wildly popular series, Walt Longmire finds himself in court defending his actions from the previous novel, The Longmire Defense (2023). The powers that be are intent on taking down the sheriff of Absaroka County, and Longmire, typically, exhibits distinct ambivalence about the whole thing.

Meanwhile, the narrator takes us down Route 66 to 1964 in the granddaddy of all back stories, as Longmire and his best friend Henry Standing Bear, recently graduated from USC and Berkeley, respectively, embark on a road trip before enlisting to serve in Vietnam. Unsurprisingly, things go wrong right off the bat.

When their truck breaks down in the middle of nowhere, they trudge into the closest town looking for help. However, Bone Valley, Arizona, is as hostile as it is surreal, and Judge Everson, the man who owns the entire place, is determined to get rid of them as quickly as possible.

What secrets does Bone Valley hold, what’s Everson hiding, and what does the abandoned World War II internment camp on the outskirts of town have to do with it? Longmire gives us an early glimpse of his dogged tenacity as he refuses to leave until he knows what’s going on.

While each new Longmire novel is always a welcome treat to his fans, it must be said—with great reluctance—that this one doesn’t quite measure up to the author’s usual standards of excellence.

The interwoven two-track plot is fine as such, oscillating between the present and the past, but one wonders why the author found it necessary to rehash the previous novel instead of moving forward with fresh material. The second track, our deep dive into Longmire’s past, has more serious challenges.

The setting, a bizarre town with strange people and mysterious happenings, is quite similar to what Johnson worked with much more effectively in Hell and Back (2022). In that novel, Fort Pratt, Montana was a deliberately surrealist and gothic backdrop to the author’s explorations of the supernatural and just plain spooky, and the plot and setting worked well together.

Here, however, Bone Valley is just frustratingly vague, and problems arise when the plot constantly spirals around the mystery of the internment camp, the church, and the surrounding desert without seeming to move things forward. Perhaps the author was invoking a Hotel California type of vibe—“you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave”—but after the third or fourth run through the basic elements of the place, we feel a little tired of the whole thing.

Johnson inserts some interesting aspects of Japanese culture into the story, particularly the mysterious Hannya mask from Noh theater, and his consideration of the injustice of the internment camps is another example of his ability to explore important social issues in his writing. Not to mention a guest appearance by a Yakuza hit man and his entourage who add a little violence and a little humor to the tale in equal parts.

The author also has a little fun with the time-honored Western novel convention in which the hero takes on the biggest of the bad guys in a fist fight and manages to be the last one standing, something any devoted reader of the genre will instantly recognize. Longmire may be too big to surf—a recurring motif in the story—but he’s big enough to out-slug the reigning heavyweight champion of Bone Valley.

Finally, there’s the matter of Johnson’s overall tone and style. Putting aside the setting and plot problems for a moment, the author’s prose once again has a rhythm to it that never fails to greet the reader like an old friend. The narration is by turns wry, hard-assed, friendly, and philosophical. The rhythm carries us through the novel like a beach break wave until we reach the end, and we’re glad we took the ride.

The bottom line? Longmire novels are an experience not to be missed.

First Frost extends the Longmire legend with an interesting look into his formative years that fans of the series will enjoy. While the novel has its shortcomings, we’ll all wait impatiently to see what adventure our hero will experience next.