Recovering from his harrowing experience in Mexico, Sheriff Walt Longmire returns to Absaroka County, Wyoming, to lick his wounds and try once again to maintain justice in a place with grudges going back generations. When an itinerant shepherd is found dead, Longmire suspects it could be a suicide. But the shepherd's connection to the Extepares, a powerful family of Basque ranchers with a history of violence, leads the sheriff into an intricate investigation...

"Thirty-three people live in Mountain City, Nevada, at the outset of Gregory Martin's portrait: by the end of the book, there are thirty-one and none of them are children. The town's heyday is long past, its abandoned mines testimony to the cycle of promise, exploitation, abandonment, and attrition that has been the repeated story of the West. Yet the comings and goings at Tremewan's, the general store Martin's family has run for more than forty years,...