Craig Johnson Books in Order: The Complete Walt Longmire Reading Guide

Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire mysteries have sold more than three million copies worldwide, and in 2025 the Western Writers of America handed Johnson their Owen Wister Award for lifetime contributions to Western literature — on top of a Bouchercon Lifetime Achievement Award the same year. That’s a lot of hardware for a series that started as one debut novel about a Wyoming sheriff who just wanted a quiet last few years on the job.

Twenty-two novels and more than a half-dozen shorter stories later, Absaroka County is still standing, Walt is still solving murders he’d honestly rather not, and this guide covers the Craig Johnson books in order, cover to cover — full novels, novellas, and the Christmas short stories Johnson used to mail directly to fans. If you only know Walt Longmire from Robert Taylor and the Netflix series, stick around; we’ll get to how the show and the books diverge, too.

The Craig Johnson Books in Order

Good news first: for the numbered novels, publication order and story order are the same thing. Walt ages in something close to real time, and Johnson has kept his timeline tidy for two decades. The complication is the run of shorter pieces — eBook stories, story collections, and standalone novellas — that Johnson has released alongside the novels since 2012. Below, everything is listed in the order it was actually published, novels and shorter works together, which is also the order most fans read them in. A few of these shorter pieces jump backward into Walt’s earlier life rather than continuing the present-day story, and we’ll flag those as we go.

1. The Cold Dish (2004)

Summary: Twenty-five years into the job, Sheriff Walt Longmire just wants to finish out his tenure in peace. Instead, a young man named Cody Pritchard turns up dead near the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, killed with an antique Sharps rifle. Two years earlier, Cody was one of four local boys who received suspended sentences for assaulting a Cheyenne girl with fetal alcohol syndrome — and now someone appears to be working down that list. Walt, his best friend Henry Standing Bear, and his sharp-tongued new deputy Victoria Moretti have to figure out whether this is vigilante justice or something colder, before the killer reaches boy number two.

Key Themes: vengeance vs. justice, small-town secrets, sexual violence and its aftermath, grief, moral complicity

Notable Elements: Series debut. Introduces the whole core cast — Henry, Vic, Dog, dispatcher Ruby, and fictional Absaroka County itself — and sets the template Johnson will spend two decades refining.

2. Death Without Company (2006)

Summary: Mari Baroja dies at the Durant Home for Assisted Living, and everyone assumes old age took her — until the autopsy finds poison. Walt’s investigation reaches back fifty years into Mari’s history with Wyoming’s Basque community, and it puts his mentor and predecessor, former sheriff Lucian Connally, uncomfortably close to the center of things. The case widens into a tangle of old marriages, coal-bed methane money, and grudges that never actually cooled off, just went quiet.

Key Themes: family loyalty, immigrant heritage, aging and marginalization, buried grudges

Notable Elements: Deputy Santiago “Sancho” Saizarbitoria joins the department, and Lucian Connally gets the first of many deep-dive backstory chapters — he’s a series highlight from here on out.

3. Kindness Goes Unpunished (2007)

Summary: Walt tags along with Henry on a trip to Philadelphia, mostly to see his daughter Cady, a lawyer there. He barely gets his boots off before Cady is savagely attacked and left in a coma on the steps of the Franklin Institute. Out of his jurisdiction and out of his element, Walt leans on Vic’s enormous Philadelphia police family to work a case that turns out to involve a political cover-up with roots closer to home than he’d like.

Key Themes: fatherhood, urban vs. rural justice, found family, protectiveness curdling into obsession

Notable Elements: The series’ first real change of scenery — and a much darker, more personal Walt than the first two books showed. This is where the Moretti family gets fleshed out.

4. Another Man’s Moccasins (2008)

Summary: A young Vietnamese woman is found dead beside the interstate, and the only witness is a homeless Crow veteran named Virgil White Buffalo, discovered nearby with her purse. It looks open-and-shut, except Walt doesn’t believe Virgil did it — and a photograph in the victim’s belongings connects her death to a case Walt investigated as a young Marine in Vietnam, forty years earlier. The novel alternates between present-day Absaroka County and 1968, tracing how one death echoes another across four decades.

Key Themes: war trauma, memory, human trafficking, guilt and delayed reckoning

Notable Elements: The first dual-timeline structure in the series, and a big one for backstory — we get Walt and Henry’s actual Vietnam service in detail for the first time. Won the 2009 Spur Award for Best Western Short Novel.

5. The Dark Horse (2009)

Summary: Wade Barsad locked his wife’s horses in their barn and burned it to the ground; in return, Mary Barsad shot him six times in the head — or so she confessed. Walt doesn’t buy it. He unpins his badge, poses as an insurance investigator, and moves into the dying town of Absalom to find out who else wanted Wade dead, which turns out to be nearly everyone. This one’s a slow-burn, atmosphere-heavy entry, and it’s a fan favorite for a reason.

Key Themes: domestic abuse, small-town corruption, undercover identity, moral ambiguity

Notable Elements: Walt goes undercover for the first time, trading his star for an assumed name — a device Johnson returns to later in the series (see Return to Sender).

6. Junkyard Dogs (2010)

Summary: It starts with a severed thumb in a Styrofoam cooler at the town dump, and it only gets stranger from there — an elderly man dragged behind a car by his own family, a feuding junkyard clan, and a development company that wants the whole eyesore gone. Walt hands the thumb investigation to his gun-shy deputy Sancho to rebuild his confidence, and the case spirals into murder, drugs, and generational family dysfunction dressed up as a comedy of errors.

Key Themes: family dysfunction, class and gentrification, dark comedy, small-town economics

Notable Elements: One of the lighter, funnier entries in the series — a deliberate palate cleanser after the intensity of the first five books, with two junkyard dogs (Butch and Sundance) doing a fair amount of the plot’s heavy lifting.

7. Hell Is Empty (2011)

Summary: Walt is transporting a confessed child killer, Raynaud Shade, to a handoff with federal officials when Shade and two other prisoners break loose during a blizzard and vanish into the Bighorn Mountains. What should be a straightforward manhunt becomes deeply personal once Walt learns the identity of Shade’s victim, and he heads up Cloud Peak alone, guided by a battered paperback of Dante’s Inferno and a mysterious mountain hermit named Virgil White Buffalo, who may or may not be entirely of this world.

Key Themes: survival, justice vs. vengeance, spiritual reckoning, man against the elements

Notable Elements: A structural departure — almost the entire book is one extended, snowbound chase, and it leans hard into myth and mysticism. Divisive among readers who want more procedural mystery, beloved by everyone else.

8. Divorce Horse (2012)

Summary: Still nursing the aftereffects of his mountain manhunt in Hell Is Empty, Walt would very much like to sit still for five minutes. No such luck — Cady’s in town helping him “recuperate” ahead of her wedding, the American Indian Days Parade has flooded Durant with visitors, and a champion Indian Relay racehorse, nicknamed for the marriage it broke up, has gone missing from a prominent racer’s stable. Walt, Henry, and Cady chase the animal down together, with considerably less bloodshed than usual.

Key Themes: family bonds, small-town festivity, recovery, light comic relief

Notable Elements: An eBook-only short story written as connective tissue between Hell Is Empty and As the Crow Flies — the most skippable entry on this list, but a genuinely fun one if you want a breather between two heavier books.

9. As the Crow Flies (2012)

Summary: With Cady’s wedding two weeks out and the venue just gone up in smoke — literally — Walt and Henry scout a replacement site on the Cheyenne Reservation. They’re standing at the base of a cliff called Painted Warrior when a young Crow woman falls to her death right in front of them, infant son somehow still in her arms and, remarkably, unharmed. It’s not Walt’s jurisdiction, but the reservation’s brand-new, hot-tempered police chief, Lolo Long, drags him into the investigation anyway, all while he’s supposed to be finalizing seating charts.

Key Themes: family and tradition, tribal jurisdiction, mentorship, cross-cultural respect

Notable Elements: Introduces Lolo Long, who becomes a recurring figure in later books (most significantly Daughter of the Morning Star), and puts the Northern Cheyenne Reservation on the map as a returning setting.

10. Christmas in Absaroka County (2012)

Summary: Four short, holiday-set glimpses into Walt’s life that don’t fit anywhere else in the novels: a hungover New Year’s Day house call on an elderly abuse victim, a stranger’s knock two days before Christmas that reopens old grief over Martha, a Christmas-shopping trip with Cady that turns into an unplanned act of kindness, and a fourth story rounding out the set. These are character pieces rather than plotted mysteries — several began as the “Post-it” holiday notes Johnson used to send fans directly before they were ever collected.

Key Themes: grief and memory, quiet kindness, holiday melancholy, small-town intimacy

Notable Elements: A collection of four eBook short stories that also includes the first chapter of The Cold Dish as a sampler — genuinely one of the better on-ramps for a reader who’s never tried Johnson before.

11. Messenger (2013)

Summary: Returning from a fishing trip, Walt, Henry, and Vic get flagged down by a forest ranger and a young woman, both stranded on top of a portable toilet and fending off three very real bears. The story the pair tells about something else entirely inside that outhouse pulls Walt into stranger territory than a few grizzlies — toward what Henry calls a messenger from the Camp of the Dead, one with an unsettlingly personal connection to Walt himself.

Key Themes: dark comedy, mysticism, friendship, the absurd colliding with the sacred

Notable Elements: An eBook short story, and one of the funniest entries in the whole catalog — readers consistently cite the image of Henry and Walt holding Vic upside-down over a toilet reservoir as a series highlight.

12. A Serpent’s Tooth (2013)

Summary: Homecoming week in Durant gets interrupted by a pantsless teenage boy fleeing an elderly woman’s house, convinced she’d been “blessed by an angel” doing her repairs. The boy, Cord Lynear, is a Mormon “lost boy” — cast out of a polygamous compound to thin the competition for wives — and searching for his missing mother. Walt, Vic, and Henry end up at the barbed-wire edge of a heavily armed interstate polygamy group, aided (or complicated) by a self-appointed bodyguard who insists he’s a two-hundred-year-old Mormon folk hero back from the dead.

Key Themes: religious extremism, exploitation, found family, faith versus fanaticism

Notable Elements: One of the stranger, darker entries — the eccentric side characters are pure Johnson, but the underlying subject matter is handled with more weight than the book’s oddball tone might suggest.

13. Spirit of Steamboat (2013)

Summary: On a snowy Christmas Eve, a young woman Walt doesn’t recognize walks into his office asking about his predecessor, Lucian Connally, now living out his days at the Durant Home for Assisted Living. One whispered word — “Steamboat” — sends the story back to Christmas Eve 1988, Walt’s first year as sheriff, when a severely burned child needed an emergency flight to Denver through a record-breaking blizzard, and the only aircraft available was a decommissioned WWII bomber that hadn’t flown in decades.

Key Themes: sacrifice, mentorship, mortality, the debts we carry without knowing it

Notable Elements: A standalone novella and genuine standout even among readers who otherwise skip the shorter material — it was Wyoming’s first-ever “One Book Wyoming” selection.

14. Any Other Name (2014)

Summary: Walt’s former boss Lucian Connally calls in a favor: a by-the-book detective named Gerald Holman has apparently taken his own life in a neighboring county, and his widow refuses to believe it. With his first grandchild due any day and a flight to Philadelphia already booked, Walt reluctantly digs into Holman’s last case — a string of missing women that stretches from a strip club to a casino in Deadwood — and finds the detective might have been sitting on evidence someone badly wanted buried.

Key Themes: institutional failure, grief, exploitation of vulnerable women, loyalty to old friends

Notable Elements: Lucian gets significant page time here, and the plot pushes Walt outside his own jurisdiction more aggressively than usual — a choice that split readers but sets up the Black Hills geography Johnson returns to later.

15. Wait for Signs (2014)

Summary: A full decade’s worth of Johnson’s annual Christmas Eve short stories, gathered in one place for the first time, plus one brand-new addition (“Petunia, Bandit Queen of the Bighorns”). The dozen stories range across Walt’s whole timeline — some dig into his grief over Martha, some are pure comedy, and together they work less like a single narrative than a photo album of the character, assembled by someone who clearly loves him.

Key Themes: memory and loss, friendship, small-town Wyoming life, holiday tradition

Notable Elements: A collection of 12 short stories with an introduction by Lou Diamond Phillips, who plays Henry Standing Bear on the TV series — a nice bridge for readers who came to the books through the show.

16. Dry Bones (2015)

Summary: When the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever discovered turns up on Cheyenne rancher Danny Lone Elk’s property, it should be a windfall for the local dinosaur museum. Then Danny is found floating face-down in his own turtle pond, and an autopsy rules out simple bad luck. With the fossil worth millions and the federal government, the tribe, and Danny’s own family all staking a claim, Walt has to figure out who benefited most from a man’s death — while an ambitious federal attorney turns the whole investigation into a photo opportunity.

Key Themes: greed, tribal sovereignty, science versus tradition, inheritance disputes

Notable Elements: A genuinely unusual premise for a crime novel — the paleontology angle is clearly close to Johnson’s own research interests, and it ties tribal land rights into the plot in a way earlier books only gestured at.

17. The Highwayman (2016)

Summary: Wyoming Highway Patrol officer Rosey Wayman has just transferred to the Wind River Canyon — a stretch of road so cut off from radio contact that troopers call it no-man’s-land — when she starts receiving “officer needs assistance” calls in the middle of the night. The trouble is, the voice belongs to Bobby Womack, a legendary Arapaho patrolman who died in a fiery crash in that same canyon nearly fifty years earlier. Walt and Henry are called in to determine whether Rosey needs a psych evaluation, or whether the canyon is holding onto something it hasn’t let go of yet.

Key Themes: grief and legacy, Native folklore, the line between duty and haunting, quiet fear

Notable Elements: A standalone novella, explicitly inspired by the Charles Dickens ghost story “The Signal-Man” — one of the most purely atmospheric entries in the series, with almost no connection to the main Absaroka County cast beyond Walt and Henry.

18. An Obvious Fact (2016)

Summary: Walt and Henry head to Sturgis territory — technically on vacation, since Henry has an annual date with the Jackpine Gypsies hill climb in nearby Hulett — when a young biker is run off the road and left critical. What looks like a routine hit-and-run pulls in rival motorcycle clubs, the ATF, and a small-town police force that just took delivery of a military surplus vehicle it has no business owning. Along the way, Vic’s complicated family history and Henry’s own biker-adjacent past both get some overdue page time.

Key Themes: found family, subculture and belonging, old wounds resurfacing, institutional overreach

Notable Elements: The largest motorcycle rally in the world (Sturgis) makes for a change-of-pace backdrop, and the title’s Sherlock Holmes epigraph — Henry won’t stop quoting Conan Doyle — is a running gag throughout.

19. The Western Star (2017)

Summary: A photograph on a wall — twenty-four armed sheriffs posed in front of a steam locomotive — sends Walt back to 1972, when a fresh-from-Vietnam Deputy Longmire rode the Wyoming Sheriffs’ Association’s annual excursion train with his mentor Lucian. It’s Johnson’s homage to Murder on the Orient Express, right down to the paperback Agatha Christie novel Walt carries the whole trip, and of course, a murder breaks out among the passengers. In the present day, Walt is fighting to keep a dangerous man’s parole hearing from going the wrong way, and the two timelines collide by the final chapters.

Key Themes: mortality, memory, institutional corruption, homage and nostalgia

Notable Elements: The second dual-timeline novel (after Another Man’s Moccasins), and the deepest look yet at young Walt’s marriage to Martha and his earliest days under Lucian’s wing.

20. Depth of Winter (2018)

Summary: This is the one where the series leaves Wyoming behind entirely. Cady has been kidnapped by Tomás Bidarte, the head of a brutal Mexican drug cartel with a longstanding grudge against Walt, and the American and Mexican governments can offer next to nothing. Walt crosses the border alone, without jurisdiction, backup, or even a passport, into the Chihuahua Desert — and what follows reads less like a mystery than a Western action thriller, full of shootouts, betrayals, and a body count Johnson doesn’t shy away from.

Key Themes: fatherhood, vengeance, cross-border violence, the limits of the law

Notable Elements: A hard structural break from the rest of the series — no procedural mystery here, just a rescue mission — that pays off (and closes out) a cartel storyline seeded in earlier books. Divisive, but undeniably a swing for the fences.

21. Land of Wolves (2019)

Summary: Still recovering physically and mentally from Mexico, Walt comes home to something almost soothingly ordinary by comparison: a dead sheep in the Bighorns, apparently killed by a wolf thought locally extinct. Then the shepherd turns up hanged nearby, his connection to a powerful Basque ranching family drawing Walt into a case that’s either a tragic suicide or something much darker, with the wolf controversy stirring up ranchers and conservationists on both sides.

Key Themes: grief and recovery, environmental conflict, migrant labor, man versus nature

Notable Elements: A deliberate return to the series’ roots after Depth of Winter’s detour — many longtime readers count this among Johnson’s strongest entries precisely because it’s back to a “normal” Absaroka County mystery.

22. Next to Last Stand (2020)

Summary: When Walt’s friend Charley Lee Stillwater dies of an apparent heart attack at the Wyoming veterans’ home, he leaves behind a shoebox stuffed with a million dollars in cash and what looks like a study for a section of Custer’s Last Fight — the famous painting believed destroyed in a 1946 fire. Was it really lost? Walt’s search for the truth about Charley Lee’s fortune turns into an art-heist investigation with real historical texture, since the actual painting (and its bizarre afterlife as a Budweiser advertisement) is grounded in fact.

Key Themes: history and myth, memory, unfinished business, the value we assign the past

Notable Elements: One of Johnson’s most research-driven premises — the painting and its history are real, even if the surviving copy in this novel isn’t.

23. Daughter of the Morning Star (2021)

Summary: Tribal Police Chief Lolo Long calls in Walt and Henry when her niece Jaya, a Montana high school basketball star, starts receiving death threats. Jaya’s older sister disappeared a year earlier — one name among a devastating number of missing and murdered Native women — and Lolo hopes Walt’s involvement might finally draw attention to the crisis. What follows blends a very real, very urgent statistic with genuinely unnerving supernatural elements, as Walt finds himself facing something that may not be entirely human.

Key Themes: missing and murdered Indigenous women, generational trauma, mysticism, advocacy through storytelling

Notable Elements: Widely considered one of the strongest and most emotionally serious entries in the series; Johnson researched the statistics extensively and says so in his acknowledgments. Sets up the two-book arc that follows.

24. Hell and Back (2022)

Summary: Walt wakes up disoriented in a snow-covered street, covered in blood, with no memory of how he got there and a bullet missing from his gun. The town is Fort Pratt, Montana — site of a real historical tragedy, an 1896 boarding-school fire that killed dozens of Native children — and everyone Walt meets there seems to be a ghost. Meanwhile, in the world he’s forgotten, Vic and Henry are searching for him, unaware of just how far outside reality he’s wandered.

Key Themes: memory and identity, historical atrocity, the supernatural, reckoning with the past

Notable Elements: A direct continuation of Daughter of the Morning Star’s mystical arc, and the most overtly supernatural entry in the series — structurally unlike anything else in the Longmire catalog.

25. The Longmire Defense (2023)

Summary: A routine search-and-rescue call in the Bighorns turns up a decades-old rifle that matches the weapon used to kill Wyoming’s state accountant back in 1948 — a cold case that stalled because nobody at the elk camp where the victim was found was carrying the right caliber. When Walt traces the rifle’s owner, it turns out to be his own infamous grandfather, Lloyd Longmire, and the investigation drags up a hidden mineral fund that someone is still willing to kill to protect.

Key Themes: family legacy, inherited guilt, small-town secrets, personal ethics under pressure

Notable Elements: The deepest dive yet into Walt’s own family history — we finally get real detail on the Longmire name before Walt. Won the Spur Award and is frequently cited as one of the series’ tightest plots.

26. First Frost (2024)

Summary: Two timelines run side by side here. In 1964, Walt and Henry — freshly graduated from college and about to ship out to Vietnam — take one last road trip that pulls them into an Arizona town with an ugly, buried history. In the present, Walt is called before a judge to account for the deadly events of The Longmire Defense, and powerful enemies are lining up against him while the hearing unfolds. Johnson lets the two Walts, decades apart, comment on each other in ways the earlier dual-timeline books didn’t quite attempt.

Key Themes: coming of age, accountability, the long cost of youthful choices, dual identity across time

Notable Elements: A direct sequel, in the present-day thread, to the shooting at the end of The Longmire Defense — not a great jumping-on point for new readers, even though the 1964 sections work as a mostly standalone story.

27. Tooth and Claw (2024)

Summary: Freshly home from four years in Vietnam and not remotely ready to settle down, Walt takes security work on an Alaskan oil rig, with Henry along for a visit that turns into much more. Assigned to protect a U.S. Geological Survey crew searching for ice worms on the North Slope, the two men run into an enormous, aggressive polar bear — and quickly realize the more dangerous threat isn’t the animal outside, but the co-workers beside them, who are after a fortune and willing to do almost anything to get it.

Key Themes: survival, greed, brotherhood forged in extremity, nature as adversary

Notable Elements: A standalone novella set in 1970, years before the series proper begins — the third entry (after Spirit of Steamboat and The Western Star) to dig into Walt’s pre-sheriff life, and one Johnson has said draws on Alistair MacLean-style adventure writing.

28. Return to Sender (2025)

Summary: Wyoming’s postal inspector — who happens to be a cousin of Walt’s late wife, Martha — asks for help finding Blair McGowan, a rural mail carrier who vanished off the longest postal route in the country, over three hundred miles a day through the brutal Red Desert. Walt takes the unusual step of going undercover as her replacement carrier, delivering mail while quietly working the case, and stumbles into something considerably stranger than a missing-persons file.

Key Themes: isolation, undercover investigation, belief and manipulation, the vastness of rural infrastructure

Notable Elements: A lighter, more contained mystery after the heavy mythic arc of the previous few books, with Walt’s undercover instincts (last seen in The Dark Horse) getting a fresh workout — published shortly after Johnson received the Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement.

29. The Brothers McKay (2026)

Summary: Pepper McKay — by most accounts one of the most disliked men in Absaroka County — turns up dead on his ranch in Crazy Woman Canyon, and suspects aren’t exactly in short supply. Walt’s attention lands on McKay’s four wildly different sons, all gathered for a family meeting the night before the body was found: a smooth-talking charmer, a cosmopolitan journalist, a reclusive monk, and a half-Native ranch hand who keeps the family lodge running. Each had a motive. Each swears he’s innocent. Then a second body surfaces and a wildfire tears through the canyon, trapping Walt between the killer and the fire itself.

Key Themes: inheritance and sibling rivalry, inherited sin, family loyalty under pressure, survival

Notable Elements: Structured as a loose homage to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov — right down to the title — this is Johnson’s twenty-second novel and, as of this writing, the most recent full-length entry in the series.

Publication Order vs. Chronological Order

Why Read the Craig Johnson Books in Order?

You can pick up a random Longmire novel and follow the mystery-of-the-week just fine — Johnson writes each case to stand on its own. But the emotional throughline doesn’t work that way. Walt’s grief over his late wife Martha softens and shifts over twenty years of books; his relationship with Vic develops (messily, realistically) across a decade; and recurring figures like Lucian, Virgil White Buffalo, and Lolo Long carry weight that builds with every appearance. More practically, several recent books are direct sequels to the one before — First Frost picks up literally where The Longmire Defense left off, and Hell and Back continues a supernatural arc that Daughter of the Morning Star starts. Read out of order and you’ll spoil yourself on major turns.

Tips for New Readers of Craig Johnson

• Where to start: The Cold Dish — always. It’s the origin story, and Johnson’s voice takes a book or two to fully settle, so you want to be there from the start.
• Age appropriateness: These are adult crime novels — on-page violence, sexual assault as a plot driver (especially in the first and twelfth entries), and frequent profanity from Vic Moretti. Not YA, not for younger teens.
• Best audiobook experience: Every single Longmire novel, novella, and story collection is narrated by George Guidall, one of the most prolific narrators in the business, and fans consistently rate his performance as essential to the series’ charm — this is a rare case where the audiobooks might be the preferred format.
• Which shorter pieces to actually read: Spirit of Steamboat and Tooth and Claw are the two standalone novellas worth going out of your way for. Wait for Signs and Christmas in Absaroka County are lovely but entirely optional character sketches. The bite-sized eBook stories (Divorce Horse, Messenger) are fun bonuses, not required reading.
• Companion material: If you’ve only seen the Netflix/A&E show, know that it diverges from the books fairly quickly — different character arcs, a different Vic, an entirely invented storyline involving a casino and land rights. Enjoy them as siblings, not adaptations.
• Pacing advice: The early books (1–7) can be read in quick succession; the tone shifts noticeably starting with Hell Is Empty, and Depth of Winter is a genuine hard left turn, so don’t marathon straight through if you’re someone who likes to sit with a book before moving on.

Fun Facts About Craig Johnson

• Johnson wrote The Cold Dish after moving to Ucross, Wyoming — an actual ranching community with a population of 25 or 26, depending on the year — and has lived there with his wife, Judy, ever since.
• The Longmire novels have sold more than three million copies worldwide and have been translated into 14 languages; the real town of Buffalo, Wyoming — the model for the fictional Durant — hosts an annual “Longmire Days” festival that draws around 15,000 fans.
• Another Man’s Moccasins and The Longmire Defense have each won the Western Writers of America’s Spur Award; in 2025, Johnson received both the Owen Wister Award for lifetime contributions to Western literature and Bouchercon’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
• The TV adaptation ran six seasons across two networks: it was A&E’s highest-rated original series before an abrupt cancellation after season three, and Netflix picked it up for three more seasons, running from 2012 to 2017.
• Every audiobook in the series — all 22 novels and every novella and story collection — is narrated by the same actor, George Guidall, giving the whole catalog a consistent “voice” across two decades of releases.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What order should I read the Craig Johnson books in? Publication order, which is also the story’s internal chronology for the numbered novels: start with The Cold Dish (2004) and work forward to The Brothers McKay (2026), the most recent release. The eBook stories and novellas slot in at their publication dates too, but they’re optional detours, not required reading.

Do I need to read the Longmire novellas and short stories? No, though a couple reward the effort. Spirit of Steamboat is a genuine standout even for readers who otherwise skip the shorter material, and Tooth and Claw gives real insight into young Walt and Henry. The eBook-length pieces (Divorce Horse, Messenger) are safe to skip if you’re short on time.

Is the Longmire TV series the same story as the books? No — it borrows the setting, characters, and general premise but invents its own plots fairly quickly, including storylines and relationships that don’t exist in the novels. Watch or read in either order; just don’t expect a one-to-one adaptation.

Which Craig Johnson book should I start with if I’m new to the series? The Cold Dish, without question. It’s the weakest-plotted of the early books by a small margin, but it sets up everyone and everything that follows, and skipping it means missing character context you’ll want later.

Is the Walt Longmire series finished? Not that Johnson has announced. The Brothers McKay, the twenty-second novel, arrived in May 2026, and Johnson has continued publishing roughly one new Longmire book a year for two decades running, with no stated end point in sight.

Conclusion

Twenty-two novels and a shelf of shorter stories in, Craig Johnson still hasn’t run out of things to do with a sheriff, a county, and a friendship that’s outlasted a war. Whether you’re chasing the mystery-of-the-week comfort of the early books or the heavier, myth-laced territory of the last few, having the Craig Johnson books in order in front of you makes the whole thing click into place — character arcs pay off, running jokes land, and the occasional gut-punch actually hits. Start with The Cold Dish, keep George Guidall’s audiobooks in your back pocket for road trips, and let us know in the comments which book made you a lifer. For More: craigallenjohnson.com

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Happy reading, and welcome to Absaroka County.