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Book Review of Hell is Empty (Walt Longmire, Bk 7)

Hell is Empty (Walt Longmire, Bk 7)
perryfran avatar reviewed on + 1223 more book reviews


I've been trying to fill in the gaps by reading the Longmire books that I have missed. I read this one from a library download although I did at one time have a hard copy of it that I must have given away before my move to California. This is the seventh book in the series and was as usual a good page-turner. This one was not so much a mystery as it was a chase novel. Longmire and his deputy, Sancho Saizarbitoria, are transporting some vicious prisoners, including Rynaud Shade, an adopted Crow Indian and a dangerous sociopath. Walt is tasked to escort one of them, along with the FBI and some other county sheriffs and transport personnel to a site where Shade supposedly buried a young Indian boy's body. Walt leaves them once the site has been found but while he is gone, the prisoners escape and kill several of the guards and take a female FBI agent and a security guard as hostage. Of course Walt goes after them into the freezing mountains of the Big Horn. Along the way he encounters the dead boy's grandfather Virgil (as Walt describes him, an FBI - Fuckin' Big Indian) who helps him on his way. He is dressed in a grizzly bear skin and his strength enables him to move an overturned snow cat off of Longmire. He later rescues him from a purposely set forest fire and provides a lot of Indian philosophy along the way.

Walt is pretty out of it for most of the journey. He falls at one point and sustains a concussion -- so how much of his trip is real and what is imagined? As usual, I enjoyed this outing in the Longmire saga. I now need to read Another Man's Moccasins and I will have read everything up to book 9, A Serpent's Tooth. Then I can continue through the rest of the series. Hope to do this soon.