"The Cold Dish" by Craig Johnson

When Walt Longmire, the Sheriff of the fictional Absaroka County in Wyoming, USA (well, Americans always say 'London, England' or 'Paris, France'), first hears of a body, he assumes it's a dead sheep. But a boy has been shot, a boy who recently completed a minimal sentence for raping Melissa, a Cheyenne girl. He fears someone is out for revenge. 

I really enjoyed this classic whodunnit. It hit all the tropes of the genre with style and it did more. I felt it brilliantly evoked the neo-wild-west feel of Wyoming's open spaces where everyone has at least one gun and some have many. The sheriff even wins a gun as a prize in a raffle for the library! And the hero-narrator-protagonist is a wonderfully self-deprecating lawman.

There was wise-cracking of the finest calibre with Ruby the lady who runs the office, Vic, Walt's lady deputy, and in particular Henry Standing Bear, his best buddy from school and Vietnam who, as Cheyenne, must be under suspicion. When Walt's ear is frost-bitten the female characters all tell him off for fiddling with the bandage while the men lay bets on whether it will need to be amputated.

The supplementary characters are also brilliant: Lonnie, Melissa's legless father, Vonnie, the poor little rich girl love interest, Dorothy who owns the diner, ex-sheriff Lucian, George Esper who escapes more often than Houdini, and Al the alcoholic.

The dialogue is witty. One of the best bits of the book is the way so many of the characters have their own distinctive way of speaking. Henry never uses a contraction such as won't or didn't or I've. Lonnie ends almost every statement with 'umhmm, yes it is so'. George, who has the excuse of a broken jaw, melds his words: 'othwe montan' = on the mountain, 'yhew kan'tsopthm' = you can't stop them. 

Selected quotes:

• "I looked at her, looking being one of my better law-enforcement techniques." (Ch 1)
• "The fuses of desire are blown black windows, and I'm gone with no pennies to save me." (Ch 1)
• "The mechanics of death ... of taking that final step from being a vertical creature to a horizontal one." (Ch 2)
• "There was more noise from the kitchen, and whistling. Unless I missed my guess, it was Prokofiev's Symphony Number One, sometimes in D, and it was being butchered." (Ch 3). Henry Standing Bear is not just an ex-marine and bar-owner but a cultured gentleman with gourmet tastes and the chef skills to match.
• "I think there was an awful lot about him that I thought I knew, but the truth was that I was just colouring in the missing parts with colors I liked." (Ch 3)
• "My clammy sweatpants were now rising up the crack of my ass." (Ch 4)
• "All the women in town chase after you now. Can you imagine what it would be like if you were good-looking to boot?" (Ch 4)
• "I had been raised as a Methodist where the highest sacrament was the bake sale." (Ch 6)
• "She always called me Trouble, even though I am sure she had caused more than I ever would." (Ch 7)
• "The rest of the cabin was made of lean-tos, which leaned to with such ambition that the outer perimeter of the cabin lay on the ground. I wasn't sure what Al did for a living, but it was a safe bet it wasn't carpentry." (Ch 9)
• "I always wondered about men who spent their time trying to anticipate and know a fish in a world where men's knowledge of each other could only be called scarce." (Ch 9)
• "In my experience, smoke usually indicated smoke and nothing more." (Ch 11)
• "It was some sort of supposed egg matter that I'm sure had never seen the rear end of a chicken and two greyish meat patties that had never oinked." (Ch 13)
• "It's department policy to only shoot people once a day; it's a budgetary thing." (Ch 16)

An exceptionally well-written police procedural whodunnit. I understand that there are now nineteen books in the series. I've fallen in love with the characters and I'd love to read some more but there are so many books in the world .

May 2023; 354 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God