Longmire juggles law, family matters

Wyoming author Craig Johnson is quite a success story. His talent as a mystery storyteller has been compared to Michael Connelly and Tony Hillerman.

Johnson’s series of Walt Longmire mysteries set in Wyoming have been best-sellers, and currently he’s on tour promoting the eighth and newest installment in the series, “As the Crow Flies.”

It’s a layered story with Sheriff Longmire at the center. He and longtime friend Henry Standing Bear are planning the wedding for Longmire’s daughter, Cady. Part of the planning involves scouting new locations for a site for the wedding after the original locale went up in smoke.

	“As The Crow Flies” by Craig Johnson Viking, $25.95, 308 pp.

Meanwhile, Longmire and Standing Bear watch from a distance as a young Crow woman falls to her death from Painted Warrior cliffs, a landmark on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation.

Lolo Long – the new tribal police chief and an Iraqi War veteran – gets Longmire to help in the investigation. Even though it’s not in Longmire’s jurisdiction, he feels an obligation to mentor the police chief.

Longmire must juggle his personal life as the father of the bride to be and his professional life as a law enforcement officer.

Publishers Weekly, a trade publication, gave the novel a starred review and it is listed as an Indie Next Pick. “Another Man’s Mocassins,” part of the Walt Longmire series, won the Western Writers of America Spur Award for Best Novel of 2008 and the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association award for fiction in the same year.

Craig Johnson discusses, signs “As the Crow Flies, A Walt Longmire Mystery” at 7 p.m. Friday, June 1, at Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande NW; at 12:30 p.m. Saturday, June 2, at Tome on the Range, 158 Bridge St., Las Vegas, N.M., and at 6 p.m. Saturday, June 2, at Collected Works, 202 Galisteo, Santa Fe.