Onyx reviews: First Frost by Craig Johnson

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 05/25/2024

At the end of The Longmire Defense, Sheriff Walt Longmire had made several powerful people unhappy because he exposed a decades-old embezzlement scheme worth billions. His under-sheriff, Victoria Moretti also made the surprising decision to move in with him.

The contemporary story in First Frost continues to explore the repercussions of those incidents. Walt faces a preliminary hearing to determine whether his use of force was justified, although the real reason behind his possible prosecution has deeper motivations. Unlike the TV version, where Longmire also had to defend himself against a justified killing but seemed disinterested in contributing to his defense, Johnson's Longmire—the OG Longmire—is fully invested in the proceedings.

While he and Vic are arranging her additions to the household, Vic finds an old surfboard in the basement. As many people opine over the course of this book, Walt is too big a man to be a surfer, and it has been many decades, in fact, since he rode the waves off the California coast when he and Henry Standing Bear played football as students. The discovery, though, inspires him to reminisce about the incident in which the board was dented and what happened thereafter.

It's May 1964, and Henry and Walt are bound for their respective calls to duty, Henry in Louisiana and Walt at Parris Island. Having graduated from college, they are no long covered by a deferment and have enlisted for the war in Vietnam. Their farewell surfing expedition takes an unexpected turn when a cargo boat gets in trouble. Walt, never one to stand by in the face of danger, immediately takes his mammoth board and paddles out to rescue any survivors of the sinking vessel, which turns out to have been carrying drugs. Walt and Henry's presence at the scene draws the attention of the local police and of criminals who wonder if the daring duo made off with the missing drugs.

Although they're supposed to stick around for a few days at the behest of the police, Walt and Henry head east, getting their kicks on Route 66. However, they take an unexpected detour, uncertain if they're still in California or not, ending up in Bone Valley, the kind of small town that's the setting for many crime stories. The kind where the residents are reticent of outsiders. The kind that has little more than a bar/cafe and a service station and yet seems to survive in a world apart from everything else. The kind that's run by a strong-willed and domineering family and has a dark secret in its past.

Walt and Henry are stranded in town while awaiting replacement parts for Walt's damaged truck, but no one wants them there and few people are willing to engage with them. Then strange things start to happen, including a tiny person—a child?—wearing a mask from traditional Japanese theater who only Walt seems to be aware of. Readers of the series will be familiar with Walt's occasional flirtations with the supernatural, so it remains an open question whether this entity is real or not.

The town is also the location of a former Japanese internment camp. This isn't the first time the Longmire franchise has explored this shameful part of our history—a season 4 episode from the TV series ("War Eagle") covered similar ground. However, 1964 is a lot closer to the end of World War II than 2015, so the wounds are fresher and the repercussions more evident. Something terrible happened there in the not-so-distant past, and the townspeople—most particularly the powerful Everson family—don't appreciate Walt's determination to get to the bottom of the mystery.

The story is populated by a colorful group of secondary characters, including a man who has banished himself to the desert so long he doesn't know about the Korean War, let alone the Vietnamese conflict, a big bruiser who goes toe-to-toe with Walt several times, an erudite yakuza and his team, and a half-Japanese woman who runs the bar and steals Henry's heart for a while.

As Johnson explains in the book's acknowledgements (which appear at the beginning of the text, not the end), the title is a metaphor related to how true cowboys change from their palm leaf hats to their wool felt ones at the first frost, describing this time in Walt and Henry's lives as their first frost. This is a fascinating dive into the early days of the lifelong friendship, exploring a time when neither of them could guess what the future held in store. Plus, in the modern day (the book alternates frequently between the two time periods), Walt figures out how to save his bacon from those who would see him punished for doing his duty. This twentieth installment in the long-running series shows that there's still a lot of gas in the tank for Walt and his friends.