Most Popular Books by Craig Johnson

Includes excerpt from Kindness goes unpunished.

A sheriff’s mysterious death spurs the tenth Longmire novel from New York Times bestselling author Craig Johnson The hit drama Longmire is now streaming on Paramount+ Walt Longmire is sinking into high-plains winter discontent when his former boss, Lucian Conally, asks him to take on a mercy case in an adjacent county. Detective Gerald Holman is dead and Lucian wants to know what drove his old friend to take his own life. With the clock ticking on the birth of his first grandchild, Walt learns that the by-the-book detective might have suppressed evidence concerning three missing women. Digging deeper, Walt uncovers an incriminating secret so dark that it threatens to claim other lives even before the sheriff can serve justice—Wyoming style.

Introducing Wyoming’s Sheriff Walt Longmire in this riveting novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Hell Is Empty and As the Crow Flies, the first in the Longmire Mystery Series, the basis for LONGMIRE, the hit Netflix original drama series. Fans of Ace Atkins, Nevada Barr and Robert B. Parker will love this outstanding first novel, in which New York Times bestselling author Craig Johnson introduces Sheriff Walt Longmire of Wyoming’s Absaroka County. Johnson draws on his deep attachment to the American West to produce a literary mystery of stunning authenticity, and full of memorable characters. After twenty-five years as sheriff of Absaroka County, Walt Longmire’s hopes of finishing out his tenure in peace are dashed when Cody Pritchard is found dead near the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Two years earlier, Cody has been one of four high school boys given suspended sentences for raping a local Cheyenne girl. Somebody, it would seem, is seeking vengeance, and Longmire might be the only thing standing between the three remaining boys and a Sharps .45-70 rifle. With lifelong friend Henry Standing Bear, Deputy Victoria Moretti, and a cast of characters both tragic and humorous enough to fill in the vast emptiness of the high plains, Walt Longmire attempts to see that revenge, a dish best served cold, is never served at all.

A Christmas novella for fans of Craig Johnson''s New York Times bestselling series The hit drama Longmire is now streaming on Paramount+ Sheriff Walt Longmire is in his office reading A Christmas Carol when he is interrupted by a ghost of Christmas past: a young woman with a hairline scar and more than a few questions about his predecessor, Lucian Connally. With his daughter Cady and undersherrif Moretti otherwise engaged, Walt’s on his own this Christmas Eve, so he agrees to help her. At the Durant Home for Assisted Living, Lucian is several tumblers into his Pappy Van Winkle’s and swears he’s never clapped eyes on the woman before. Disappointed, she whispers “Steamboat” and begins a story that takes them all back to Christmas Eve 1988—a story that will thrill and delight the bestselling series’ devoted fans.

The inspiration for A&E''s "Longmire" finds himself in the crosshairs in the ninth book of the "New York Times"-bestselling series. Cord Lynear is searching for his missing mother but clues are scarce. Longmire and his crew come to help.

Sheriff Walt Longmire faces an icy hell in this New York Times bestseller from Craig Johnson The hit drama Longmire is now streaming on Paramount+ Well-read and world-weary, Sheriff Walt Longmire has been maintaining order in Wyoming''s Absaroka County for more than thirty years, but in this riveting seventh outing, he is pushed to his limits. Raynaud Shade, an adopted Crow Indian rumored to be one of the country''s most dangerous sociopaths, has just confessed to murdering a boy ten years ago and burying him deep within the Bighorn Mountains. Walt is asked to transport Shade through a blizzard to the site, but what begins as a typical criminal transport turns personal when the veteran lawman learns that he knows the dead boy''s family. Guided only by Indian mysticism and a battered paperback of Dante''s Inferno, Walt braves the icy hell of the Cloud Peak Wilderness Area, cheating death to ensure that justice—both civil and spiritual—is served.

Craig Johnson''s mystery stories have earned him an esteemed position in the pantheon of contemporary crime novelists. In this fourth installment, Longmire is called to investigate a dead Vietnamese girl found along the Wyoming highway. --Amazon.com.

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, 2007.

The eighth Longmire novel from New York Times bestselling author Craig Johnson The hit drama Longmire is now streaming on Paramount+ Wyoming sherriff Walt Longmire doesn''t have time for cowboys and criminals. His daughter, Cady, is getting married in two weeks, and the wedding locale arrangements have just gone up in smoke signals. Fearing Cady''s wrath, Walt and his old friend Henry Standing Bear set out for the Cheyenne Reservation to find a new site for the nuptials. But their expedition ends in horror as they witness a young Crow woman plummeting from Painted Warrior''s majestic cliffs. Is it a suicide, or something more sinister? It''s not Walt''s turf, but he''s coerced into the investigation by Lolo Long, the beautiful new tribal police chief.

Sheriff Walt Longmire is faced with a modern-day ranch war in this gripping novel from New York Times bestselling author Craig Johnson The hit drama Longmire is now streaming on Paramount+ It''s a volatile new economy in Durant, Wyoming when the owners of a multimillion-dollar development of ranchettes want to get rid of the adjacent Stewart junkyard. Meeting the notorious Stewart clan is an adventure unto itself, and when conflict erupts—and someone ends up dead—Sheriff Walt Longmire, his lifelong friend Henry Standing Bear, and deputies Santiago Saizarbitoria and Victoria Moretti find themselves in a small town that feels more and more like a high-plains pressure cooker. Walt Longmire is up to his badge in the darker aspects of human nature, making his way through the case with a combination of love, laughs, and derelict automobiles.

Sheriff Walt Longmire and Henry Standing Bear embark on their latest adventure in this novella set in the world of Craig Johnson’s New York Times bestselling Longmire series The hit drama Longmire is now streaming on Paramount+ When Wyoming highway patrolman Rosey Wayman is transferred to the beautiful and imposing landscape of the Wind River Canyon, an area the troopers refer to as no-man''s-land because of the lack of radio communication, she starts receiving “officer needs assistance” calls. The problem? They''re coming from Bobby Womack, a legendary Arapaho patrolman who met a fiery death in the canyon almost a half-century ago. With an investigation that spans this world and the next, Sheriff Walt Longmire and Henry Standing Bear take on a case that pits them against a legend: The Highwayman.

Investigating an accident that left a cyclist in critical condition, Walt is confronted by complications in the form of competing biker gangs, the ATF bureau, an entrepreneur''s donation of a military-grade vehicle, and a femme fatale.

Ten years ago, Craig Johnson wrote his first short story, the Hillerman Award-winning "Old Indian Trick." Each Christmas Eve thereafter, fans rejoiced when Johnson sent out a new short story featuring an episode in Walt''s life that doesn''t appear in the novels; over the years, many have asked why they can''t buy the stories in book form. Wait for Signs collects those beloved stories-and one entirely new story, "Petunia, Bandit Queen of the Bighorns"--For the very first time in a single volume.

Walt doubts a confession of murder in this novel from the New York Times bestselling author Wade Barsad, a man with a dubious past and a gift for making enemies, burned his wife Mary''s horses in their barn; in retribution, she shot him in the head six times, or so the story goes. But Sheriff Walt Longmire doesn''t believe Mary''s confession and is determined to dig deeper. Unpinning his star to pose as an insurance investigator, Walt visits the Barsad ranch and discovers that everyone in town--including a beautiful Guetemalan bartender and a rancher with a taste for liquor--had a reason for wanting Wade dead.

The past and future collide in this gripping new addition to the beloved New York Times bestselling Longmire series. It’s the summer of 1964, and recent college graduates Walt Longmire and Henry Standing Bear read the writing on the wall and enlist to serve in the Vietnam War. As they catch a few final waves in California before reporting for duty, a sudden storm assaults the shores and capsizes a nearby cargo boat. Walt and Henry jump to action, but it’s soon revealed by the police who greet them ashore that the sunken boat carried valuable contraband from underground sources. The boys, in their early twenties and in the peak of their physical prowess from playing college football for the last four years, head out on Route 66. The question, of course, is how far they will get before the consequences of their actions catch up to them—the answer being, not very. Back in the present day, Walt is forced to speak before a Judge following the fatal events of The Longmire Defense. With powerful enemies lurking behind the scenes, the sheriff of Absaroka County must consider his options if he wishes to finish the fight he started. Going back and forth between 1964 and the present day, Craig Johnson brings us a propulsive dual timeline as Walt Longmire stands between the crossfire of good and evil, law and anarchy, and compassion and cruelty at two pivotal stages in his life.

Sheriff Walt Longmire''s trip down memory lane leads to a mystery in the present in this mystery from New York Times bestselling author Craig Johnson The hit drama Longmire is now streaming on Paramount+ Walt is enjoying a celebratory beer after a weapons certification at the Wyoming Law Enforcement Academy when a younger sheriff confronts him with a photograph of twenty-five armed men standing in front of a Challenger steam locomotive. It takes him back to when, fresh from the battlefields of Vietnam, then-deputy Walt accompanied his mentor Lucian to the annual Wyoming Sheriff''s Association junket held on the excursion train known as the Western Star, which ran the length of Wyoming from Cheyenne to Evanston and back. Armed with his trusty Colt .45 and a paperback of Agatha Christie''s Murder on the Orient Express, the young Walt was ill-prepared for the machinations of twenty-four veteran sheriffs, let alone the cavalcade of curious characters that accompanied them. The photograph—along with an upcoming parole hearing for one of the most dangerous men Walt has encountered in a lifetime of law enforcement—hurtles the sheriff into a head-on collision of past and present, placing him and everyone he cares about squarely on the tracks of runaway revenge.

Sheriff Walt Longmire uncovers a cold case that hits very close to home and forces him to put his life on the line with implications that some people would kill to keep buried forever The hit drama Longmire is now streaming on Paramount+ Sheriff Walt Longmire and Dog are called on a routine search and rescue to Wyoming’s Bigu00adhorn Mountains, where Walt finds himself on a rock outcropping remembering when his father told him about the first time he saw a man die. In the late forties, Bill Sutherland was shot but the investigation was stymied because no memu00adber of the elk camp—where he was found—was carrying the caliber rifle that killed the state accountant. When Dog discovers the missu00ading weapon, the sheriff of Absaroka County is plunged headfirst into a cold case. His invesu00adtigation quickly finds ties to a hidden mineral fund that someone is willing to kill to keep secret. The embodiment of the fair-minded detective, Walt is pushed to his ethical boundu00adaries. In his relentless pursuit of the truth, he discovers the rifle in question belonged to none other than Walt’s infamous and uncompromisu00ading grandfather, Lloyd Longmire.

Walt Longmire and Henry Standing Bear are back, and in the tradition of Wait for Signs and The Highwayman, this action-packed novella set in the Alaska Tundra pushes our heroes to their limits as they face powerful enemies who will do anything to get what they want. Tooth and Claw follows Walt and Henry up to Alaska as they look for work after they both returned from serving in Vietnam. While working for an oil company in the bitter cold of winter, they soon encounter a ferocious polar bear that seems hell-bent on their destruction. But it’s not too long until they realize the danger does not lurk outside in the frozen Alaska tundra, but with their co-workers, who are after priceless treasure and will stop at nothing to get it. Fans of Craig Johnson will thrill to this pulse-pounding and bone-chilling story of extreme adventure that adds another indelible chapter to the legend of Walt Longmire.

The eighteenth novel in the beloved New York Times bestselling Longmire series The hit drama Longmire is now streaming on Paramount+ What if you woke up lying in the middle of the street in the infamous town of Fort Pratt, Montana, where thirty young Native boys perished in a tragic 1896 boarding-school fire? What if every person you encountered in that endless night was dead? What if you were covered in blood and missing a bullet from the gun holstered on your hip? What if there was something out there in the yellowed skies, along with the deceased and the smell of ash and dust, something the Northern Cheyenne refer to as the Éveohtsé-heómėse, the Wandering Without, the Taker of Souls? What if the only way you know who you are is because your name is printed in the leather sweatband of your cowboy hat, and what if it says your name is Walt Longmire . . . but you don’t remember him? In Hell and Back, the eighteenth installment of the Longmire series, author Craig Johnson takes the beloved sheriff to the very limits of his sanity to do battle with the most dangerous adversary he’s ever faced: himself.