Tooth and Claw

June 1, 2024

Bestseller Johnson (the "Longmire" series; also adapted on Netflix) offers a short holiday novel set in Alaska, featuring a baby polar bear and a young Walt and Henry, who are looking for work after returning home from the Vietnam War. They find it with an oil company, but there is danger on the tundra. Prepub Alert.

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September 16, 2024
Walt Longmire faces off against an Alaskan polar bear in Johnson’s underwhelming latest adventure for the Wyoming sheriff (after First Frost). In an extended flashback, Longmire recalls accepting a security job for an oil company drilling in Alaska in 1970. The drilling has caused tension with environmentalists in the region, who want 20 million acres of Alaskan land set aside as a national wildlife refuge. Walt is assigned to a survey team testing ice cores, but shortly after the group reaches their site, someone is killed. Initially, the evidence indicates a wild animal attack, but Blackjack, an Indigenous sniper on the security detail, warns the survivors it may actually be the work of “nanurluk, the great bear god who cannot be killed.” As Longmire and his cohorts fight to stay alive, certain members of their party reveal sinister motives. The story is framed as a conversation between Walt and another survivor, which drains the story of suspense, and Johnson’s gruff prose lacks the atmospherics necessary to pull off a survival thriller in the vein of The Terror. Some gratifyingly gruesome action aside, this one’s best suited to series diehards. Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman Literary.

Sheriff Walt Longmire looks back on an episode from his early years--a life-or-death fight on Alaska's North Slope. Returning from Vietnam in 1970, Walt finds that he's not ready to go home to Wyoming, so he takes a job as security chief on an Alaskan oil rig. His old friend Henry, known as the Cheyenne Nation, is visiting for a few days, and the two of them decide to work security for a team from the U.S. Geological Survey that's heading out to search for ice worms. When their plane lands, the group puts up a 20-foot metal tower from which one man will watch for polar bears looking for their next meal. While heading to their research site, Walt, Henry, and the scientists see an enormous polar bear in the distance, and then come across a den where a female bear and one of her cubs have been killed, though Henry rescues the other cub. Heading back to the plane, they find one of the USGS scientists, nearly hysterical, who tells them that the huge bear they'd first seen has killed his colleague. As a storm approaches, the survivors must spend the night in the plane, but while they're checking the ice screws that anchor it to the ground, the bear snatches another crew member. Then, despite the screws, the plane rips loose, turns over, and skids out onto the unstable icepack. Their only hope may be a ghost ship, the abandoned SS Baychimo, which has been floating around the Arctic since 1931. It's been sighted only occasionally, but when they find it, it turns out to be far safer than a sinking plane. As the men use the ship's coal supply, they try to jury rig the telegraph to contact the outside world. But the ship is home to the giant bear they've tangled with before, who plays cat to their mice. A chilling novel with all the ingredients needed to keep readers turning pages.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (Online Review)

October 1, 2024
Before Walt Longmire was the easy-going, drily witty sheriff of a little Wyoming town, he worked security for an oil company. He and his sidekick, the tavern-owning Cheyenne Henry Standing Bear, present this story as a flashback to that time, perhaps in the mid-seventies, in Alaska. They're facing ""the snow and the cold and the blowing alone"" to set up a drilling site. Once past the opening jumble of names recognizable only to readers of Johnson's long-running series and viewers of the now streaming Longmire, the plot quickly develops as Walt senses that someone or something out in the darkness is stalking them. Spooky fun ensues as the men begin their search, slow and scared, for whatever-it-is that has a paw print 18-inches wide. But is it only a massive wild creature on their trail, or is the greed of their coworkers also a threat? It all comes to a bloody head. Seeming to channel Noel Coward, Walt wonders about the pending attack, "". . . do you suppose he'd be considerate enough to do it from directly in front?

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.