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John's Reviews > The Dark Horse
The Dark Horse (Walt Longmire, #5)
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Once again the first-person narration of Walt Longmire, for decades the sheriff of Absaroka County, brings us into the stark beauty of the barren Wyoming landscape as winter approaches, this time with an unusually strong sense of desolation as the story centers on a mostly abandoned little town called Absalom along the Powder River in neighboring Campbell County, where Walt is obviously out of his own jurisdiction. So what's the story?
It's actually a pair of story lines, set a week apart. Each section of each chapter has a date and time of day at the heading, and we jump back and forth. Before long I realized that the earlier story would end by linking up in time with the beginning of the later story; this technique could try your patience as much as it did mine, because we're on page 238 out of 318 pages when the link is finally made--that's 75% of the book, folks, with the alternating story lines, and only the last 25% has a continuous time line.
The author may feel that this writing technique is necessary because that link--the end of the earlier story line--hands us a major clue to the mystery Walt is trying to solve and gives a solid boost to his motivation for going undercover (not very successfully, by the way) in the next county. I agree that a straight chronological narration would have been much less suspenseful, and I would probably have guessed the solution before halfway through. But this way of putting the story together added an odd sort of strain to something I really enjoyed, getting together again with Walt, Henry, Vic, and several new characters who were quite well developed, I thought.
Much of the publisher's blurb is reprinted in the summary at the top of this Goodreads page, telling us the beginnings of both story lines, but I think a part of the blurb that the Goodreads summary omits gives you a real sense of what it feels like to read this book:
It's actually a pair of story lines, set a week apart. Each section of each chapter has a date and time of day at the heading, and we jump back and forth. Before long I realized that the earlier story would end by linking up in time with the beginning of the later story; this technique could try your patience as much as it did mine, because we're on page 238 out of 318 pages when the link is finally made--that's 75% of the book, folks, with the alternating story lines, and only the last 25% has a continuous time line.
The author may feel that this writing technique is necessary because that link--the end of the earlier story line--hands us a major clue to the mystery Walt is trying to solve and gives a solid boost to his motivation for going undercover (not very successfully, by the way) in the next county. I agree that a straight chronological narration would have been much less suspenseful, and I would probably have guessed the solution before halfway through. But this way of putting the story together added an odd sort of strain to something I really enjoyed, getting together again with Walt, Henry, Vic, and several new characters who were quite well developed, I thought.
Much of the publisher's blurb is reprinted in the summary at the top of this Goodreads page, telling us the beginnings of both story lines, but I think a part of the blurb that the Goodreads summary omits gives you a real sense of what it feels like to read this book:
...Walt ventures into a town without pity to save a woman without hope. It's an unfriendly place--something that's fine with Longmire, who is looking for the truth, not friends.And Walt finds the truth, as usual, through considerable physical damage, pain, mortal danger, and deep probing into some less than willing personalities. Walt's reflections on the people he meets and on ones he already knows are worth the price of admission, and the way he relates to certain horses makes me happy I had the chance to read this book.
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