The Cold Dish

The Cold Dish is Craig Johnson's 2004 debut novel and the first book in the Walt Longmire mystery series. After twenty-five years as sheriff of Wyoming's fictional Absaroka County, Walt Longmire is looking forward to a quiet final stretch in office when Cody Pritchard is found shot dead near the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Two years earlier, Pritchard was one of four local teenagers given only suspended sentences for the rape of a Cheyenne girl — a sentence the reservation's community felt fell far short of justice.

With someone apparently working through the list of offenders with a vintage Sharps .45-70 rifle, Longmire races to protect the three remaining young men while confronting how far a community's grief and anger can drive people to take justice into their own hands. He's aided by his lifelong friend Henry Standing Bear, deputy Victoria "Vic" Moretti, and a supporting cast that Johnson renders with equal parts humor and pathos against the vast, unforgiving landscape of the high plains.

Praised for its atmospheric evocation of small-town Wyoming and its character-driven, deliberately paced storytelling, The Cold Dish earned Johnson a Dilys Award nomination and launched a long-running series later adapted into the television show "Longmire."