It has been a while since I read the Walt Longmire series, but when I had a chance to read Hell and Back, I was pleasantly reminded just a few pages in. Johnson's prose is beautiful, and the character of Walt is one that you just want to spend some time with. This is not quite the Walt I remember since Johnson takes him into mystical territory. He has strayed there in previous novels, but not to this extent.

Hell and Back opens with Walt waking up snow-covered in a street. He is also covered in blood and doesn't know his name or where he is. He sets off for the nearest lights in a diner just beginning to close. Despite an advancing blizzard, the pretty waitress (who looks somewhat familiar) still makes a meal for him. She also helps him with his name on the hatband inside his cowboy hat. He is in Fort Pratt, Montana. Fort Pratt was the home of an Indian Training School that burned to the ground over a hundred years ago, killing thirty boys. The waitress tells him there haven't been any good stories in Fort Pratt since.

The fact that Walt is missing is not lost on Vic Moretti, his under-sheriff, and his longtime friend, Henry Standing Bear. Both, along with Walt's giant indeterminately bred hound "Dog," have set off to find him in the teeth of the blizzard, and the story switches between them and Walt. Walt's wanderings feature meetings with all sorts of characters in the snowy landscape, both natural and possibly imagined. The gates of the training school are still standing. When Walt crosses onto the grounds, he thinks he is back in time to when the school was still operating, to the very day it burned at 8:17pm.

This departure may throw longtime readers of the series, but Johnson gives us the twists in plotting and robust character building that we expect. I am decidedly not a fan of Westerns, probably because I watched too many bad ones on TV in my childhood. Johnson has taken a risk with Hell and Back but succeeds in all ways.

Thanks to NetGalley and Viking for an advance digital copy. The opinions are my own.

This 18th in the series has a strong vein of horror running through it, one that was introduced in previous episodes.

Walt is in some sort of fugue state for most of what happens here. The story opens as he comes to himself (covered in blood) getting up from the snowy street of Fort Pratt, Montana, a town infamous for the deaths of thirty indigenous boys in an 1896 residential school fire.

As Walt slowly makes sense of where he is and what's happening, readers join his old friend Henry Standing Bear and feisty undersheriff Vic as they desperately try to find him, and worry that they won't do so in time.

Hell and Back: A Walt Longmire Mystery
By Craig Johnson
Viking
September 2022

Review by Cynthia Chow

When the man wakes up, he doesn’t know his name, where he is, or how he got there. A sign above an Industrial Indian Boarding School informs him that he is in Fort Pratt, but it’s a strangely familiar café waitress who tells him that he is in Montana. A band in the hat he’s wearing seems to indicate that it’s a gift to one Walt Longmire of Absaroka County, Wyoming, while the familiar-feeling gun in his holster is one issued to lawmen. Everything seems a little strange and off-kilter, and through a succession of meetings with new characters more and more information is slowly doled out.

Interspersed among Walt’s quest for answers are the determined efforts of Undersheriff Victoria Moretti and Henry Standing Bear to find him. It’s uncertain as to whom their witnesses should fear more, the enormous man known as the Cheyanne Nation or the far more ruthless, very profane Vic. As she tells the man whose lung she is preventing from bleeding out, Walt is the calm in her storm who makes her feel whole, and she will do anything to get him back safely. One never doubts that Vic would follow through on her very imaginative threats to save the man who has earned her undying loyalty and love. They are following in Walt’s footsteps as he tracked down one Artie Small Song, not knowing that they are in a race to keep Walt from taking his own last step towards a seductive lie.

This 18th in the series leans more towards its lyrically mystical novellas, which mesmerize by weaving into the plots Native American traditions and beliefs. Walt’s journey back to 1896 explores the tragedy of the Indian Boarding School, an unhygienic forced labor camp that stripped away the culture of Indigenous and was a hellhole even before the fire that killed 31 students. Walt’s journey back is challenged by an Éveohtsé-heómėse, a soul-taker, who tempts Walt away from the life he has now with the promise of what he lost in the past. Just as compelling as Walt’s otherworldly encounters is the investigation by Vic and Henry Standing Bear, whose confrontation with white supremacists is as thrilling as it is satisfying. These novels continue to introduce fascinating elements of Native American culture, never shying away from how they have been exploited and damaged by the government. The injustices of the past are confronted and met with new crimes of the present in this darkly funny, wise, and thoroughly entertaining new mystery.

CRAIG JOHNSON
Hell and Back

Sheriff Walt Longmire awakens to the sound of bells, frozen to the ground in the middle of a street, with snow falling in his face. In what may be Walt’s most puzzling adventure, he doesn’t know where he is, barely recognizes any of the people he meets, and has no idea what he’s doing there. But he stands in front of the Fort Pratt Industrial Indian Boarding School and figures there’s something real hinky about it. His job must be to find out what. Then there’s the silver dollars that simply appear. And the number of thirty-one, plus the time of 8:17 that never seems to change.

It’s hard to review this book and not give spoilers, so I’ll just say that readers will become reacquainted--as does Walt--with characters from previous books. There’s a mystery to be solved and wrongs to be righted, which Walt does in his unique, inimitable way. Be prepared for an unexpected experience with Walt, Henry Standing Bear and Deputy Vic Morelli. It's going to be wild.
- Carol Crigger