Hell is Empty

Hell is Empty
by Craig Johnson

Viking, 2011. 312 pgs. Mystery.

This seventh book in Johnson's Walt Longmire series begins in a classic vein with the title from Shakespeare's Tempest and moving quickly into Dante's Inferno, but spiraling upwards instead of down. Longmire and his deputies have delivered a scary batch of prisoners to federal agents and are on their way home when they discover a bobby pin bent into a picklock in one of the sandwiches delivered by a local lodge. Their worst fears are realized when no one can raise the FBI agents. All but two are dead--one taken as a hostage and the other scarcely alive--and Longmire sets out after the crooks without backup for the sake of the kidnapped agent. Help may be slow in coming because a brutally cold blizzard is raging on Cloud Peak. As the escapees are one by one captured or killed, the hunt becomes a battle of raw will, intelligence, and a true feel for the mountain as the sheriff pursues Raynaud Shade, a Dantean demon indeed, to the peak where both may die. Walt is joined intermittently in his search by his old friend Virgil White Buffalo, a seven-foot Crow Indian whose grandson Shade has killed, and who may or may not actually be still in the flesh. Longmire is the most appealing character imaginable and his quest through the frigid blasts of Hell makes for a killer story, in more ways than one.

LW