This was a deeply disappointing book. By the end of it, I was angry with Longmire.

The confrontation between Longmire and Bedart, the Mexican crime lord and his American second in command, Culpepper, has been coming for some time now.

Both men have demonstrated that they are vicious killers and that they have a personal vendetta against Longmire. They’ve knifed his partner, taking away her ability to have children and killing the child she was carrying. They’ve executed his son-in-law and they’ve kidnapped his daughter, sending Longmire a one-word instruction: ‘Come’

Longmire, being Longmire, sees this as a burden that he must shoulder alone and heads off to Mexico with a plan that seems to consist of four words: Get My Daughter Back

He’s a brave man and he’s willing to sacrifice himself to save his daughter.

He’s also a man who is lying to himself about what needs to be done. It’s clear that, even if, by some miracle, he gets his daughter back, his family and friends will not be safe until he kills Bedart and Culpepper. I’m sure that, at some level, he knows this but it doesn’t fit with his finely-honed self-image of the honourable lawman with a huge capacity for violence which he keeps in check because that’s what makes him a civilised man.

So he turns up in Mexico to rescue his daughter from a hill fortress, run by a man with a small army at his command and who is waiting for Longmire to arrive. He has no plan, no resources and no ability to speak the language. He’s left the people who would be best able to help him behind so he can be the lone noble knight on a doomed quest to rescue the fair maiden. His thinking is infantile and pointlessly reckless.

I could probably have written that off as ‘That’s just how Longmire is’ if he had continued on alone but even he can see that that won’t work, so he recruits local allies along the way. Each time, he absolves himself in advance for any bad things that might happen by saying that they don’t need to come all the way with him and then lets them shoulder the crazy risks anyway.

He still has no plan. He provides almost no leadership. He’s big on bravery and compassion but short on practicalities.

His biggest failing is that he demonstrates that he is a man who knows everything about guns except when he needs to use them to kill someone.

His dishonesty about the real nature of his mission means that he lets people live, sometimes more than once, who he should have killed. The cost of his clear conscience is that some of the people helping him get killed unnecessarily.

Eventually, Longmire reaches the point where he can, in good conscience, kill the men who have, since the beginning, needed to be killed but by then some of his allies are dead because he didn’t act sooner.

The rest of the book was pretty standard Longmire fare. He tackles impossible odds through a mixture of bravery, physical endurance and improvisation while occasionally losing himself to visions or delusions and offering up literary quotes and obscure historical details.

It’s well done and the twists and turns keep the story moving forward.

I wasn’t convinced by the depiction of Mexico or the Mexicans helping Longmire. Everything felt too brightly painted and too cartoonish to be real. Did the Spanish woman who helps him have to be so spectacularly beautiful? Did she have to be naked the first time she saves Longmire’s life? Did the action have to take place on the Day Of The Dead? Did the escape vehicle have to be a pink vintage Cadillac convertible with bull horns on the hood rather than an SUV?

Anyway, I hope this plot arc is now at an end and Longmire can go back to being a Sherriff in Wyoming. I’ve had enough of him playing cowboy.