First Frost

Craig Johnson sends Walt Longmire and Henry Standing Bear back to the summer of 1964, when the two young men enlist ahead of Vietnam and become entangled in a criminal mystery involving a sunken cargo boat on a California shore — while simultaneously, in the present, Walt faces judicial consequences from the fatal events of The Longmire Defense. The dual timeline structure lets Johnson show the same essential character at two very different moments of reckoning. The twentieth Longmire novel works equally as legal thriller and origin story.

George Guidall has narrated the Longmire series with such consistency and depth that his voice and Walt's voice have become difficult to disentangle — a mark of a series narrator at the peak of his craft. His handling of the time-period shifts is fluid and organic, and the 1964 sections carry a different energy from the present-day strand without jarring tonal breaks. At just under ten hours, a fully satisfying listen for longtime fans.