The Cold Dish, The Judgement of Strangers

The requirements of the mystery genre can be a useful prop for a first-time writer, as they are for Craig Johnson in The Cold Dish.  The story, set in a small town in Wyoming, is at its best when Sheriff Walt Longmire is dealing with the death of two convicted rapists.  The writing is taut and compelling, as are Walt's conflicted feelings about the case.  He had helped convict the two and thought they got off too lightly in court, and now he has a duty to protect the other two men involved in the case.  (Johnson makes the story a little more palatable by killing off the worst offenders first, with the other two being only accessories).  Johnson also has a great eye for the natural world as well as the human one, and the section where Walt forges into a blizzard to rescue a wounded man is thrilling.

Unfortunately, there's also a whole lot of folksy stuff, particularly in the first half of the book.  Walt's friends are trying to get him to get in shape, and conspire to make him work out, and the writing here is just slack.  The same is true of Walt's faltering romance with an old friend.  Luckily for Johnson, each time that the folksy stuff starts being too irritating, the mystery forces its way to the front again, and he picks up steam.  I'm looking forward to reading the second book in the series, hoping that he keeps more to his strengths.

Andrew Taylor is a much more experienced writer (The Judgement of Strangers is his 20th novel), and so he decided to dispense with most of the scaffolding for a psychological suspense novel.  Unfortunately, he didn't replace it with much except a lot of foreshadowing.  There's no real drive to this novel, whether one has read the first novel in the trilogy or not.  (The previous novel was the excellent Four Last Things).  If you have read it, then you already know which character ultimately turns out to be crazy, while if you haven't read it, Taylor's withholding of all the interesting events until the last 10 pages makes it hard to keep reading.

I was really disappointed with Judgement of Strangers; it's a weak follow-on to a very strong novel, but, more than that, it feels like it could have been so much more.  David Byfield, the first-person narrator, is a great character -- mordantly amusing on the subject of others, while largely blind to his own faults.  But he's stuck in a story with not much to do, and I think it takes a different kind of writer to pull off a novel consisting solely of witty commentary on society.