Fresh from Longmire, which had the best freshman season in total viewers for any A&E series, scripted or non-fiction, in the network’s history, Craig Johnson returns with his ninth Walt Longmire mystery, A SERPENT’S TOOTH (Viking; $26.95; ISBN: 978-0-67002645-6; Strict on sale: June 4, 2013). This time Wyoming Sheriff Walt Longmire finds himself in the crosshairs of a brewing religious war.And we're giving away a copy!
It’s homecoming for the Durant Dogies football team when teenaged Cord Lynear, a Mormon ‘lost boy,’ forced off his compound for rebellious behavior, shows up in Absaroka County. Without much guidance—divine or otherwise—Sheriff Walt Longmire, his second-in-command Victoria Moretti, and his good friend Henry Standing Bear, search for the boy’s mother. They find themselves in a high plains scavenger hunt that ends at the barbed wire doorstep of an interstate polygamy group that has recently set up shop in the neighboring town of Short Drop. The group, run by Cord’s stepfather, the four-hundred pound polygamist Roy Lynear, is frighteningly well-armed and too good at keeping secrets.
Meanwhile, the Absaroka County jail is getting crowded with the arrival of Orrin Porter Rockwell, a dangerous and delusional old man who claims he was blessed in the flesh by Joseph Smith, and who has appointed himself Cord’s bodyguard.
As Walt and Vic pursue the Lynears, things heat up in both the investigation and their personal lives; butting heads with the well-armed zealots, they hear whispers of Big Oil and the CIA and find that even with Henry Standing Bear’s assistance, they may be in for more than they had bargained for.
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