Return to Sender (2025) - Craig Johnson

 

Return to Sender is the twenty-first book in Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire series, and I’ve read every single one of them. I’ve also watched the entire Longmire television series, so you can definitely consider me a fan of Craig Johnson’s work, someone quite familiar with Walt and his surrounding cast of characters. But as much as I still look forward to the next Walt Longmire mystery, there’s one thing I learned about the stories a long time ago: they are strongest and the most fun when Walt doesn't go all solo on us. Walt is just a better sheriff, man, and fictional character when he has Henry Standing Bear, Vic Moretti, Lucian Connally, Ruby, and Cady Longmire around to shake up his personal life a bit. Johnson always produces a good, solid mystery thriller for his readers to enjoy, but what makes them special for longtime fans are Walt’s interactions with all the other series regulars.

Unfortunately, Walt’s gone and done it again in Return to Sender. This time he’s off on his own working undercover as a mailman in a remote county of Wyoming as he tries to find a mail lady who disappeared while driving her regular 307-mile route. Walt is not very good at undercover work, as he himself admits readily admits, so he’s outed fairly quickly by the locals even though for a little while he thinks he’s fooling them. His search soon leads him to a weird UFO cult in the middle of the Red Desert called The Order of the Red Gate that the mail lady seems to be connected with somehow. But, while looking for her, Walt learns disturbing details about the cult and its leaders that will make it near impossible for him to rescue everyone there who needs immediate rescuing. And he’s on his own because even the county cops are not able to offer him a whole lot of timely help way out in the middle of the desert. It’s pretty much up to Walt and Dog, his loyal canine, if this one is going to end well. 

Thankfully, there are a few pages near the middle of the book where Walt joins Vic, Henry, Cady, Ruby, and Lucien in Cheyenne for a black-tie reception. It’s only an overnighter, but it is a welcomed break in what is otherwise merely a solid mystery thriller that could easily be read as a standalone novel instead of as the most recent book in a popular two-decade-old series. Johnson seems to be going that direction more and more - and that’s kind of a shame.

Time and Again (1970) - Jack Finney

 It’s strange to me how some books can stick in your mind so firmly that even after more than fifty years you still remember the very first time you became aware of their existence. Time and Again is one of those books for me. 

My wife and I were living in Houston in mid-1972 and had driven about 110 miles back to the two little towns we had been raised in so that we could visit our folks for the first time in several months. Port Arthur had recently opened up a new library near my in-laws that caught my eye, and I decided to drop by for a quick look. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to borrow any of the books, but still couldn’t resist browsing the shelves for a few minutes anyway. But I never even made it to the shelves that day because a brand new copy of Time and Again was sitting on top of a little display between the front door and the shelves I was headed toward. The book looked interesting so I settled into a nearby chair with it for a closer look, and would hardly move again for the next two hours before reluctantly putting the book back where I found it and leaving the library to pack for home. And I was so curious about how Finney’s story would end that I bought my own copy as soon as I could make it to a Houston bookstore the following week. 

That’s the exact copy of the book I just re-read for the first time since 1972.

Finney’s story is not one involving time machines, wormholes, or parallel universes, and in a way, that makes it all the more believable. His time-travelers are specially recruited men and women who can immerse themselves into period-correct settings until they are able to use self-hypnosis to travel back in time. Si Morley is one of the few recruits actually able to pull off the stunt, and after a brief foray to 1882 New York City, during which his visit  does not impact the present, he is allowed to return to January 1882 with strict instructions that his is to be only an observer, that he is not to interact with anyone he meets. Well, that’s easier said than done.

Si takes a room in a boardinghouse where he is smitten by Julia, niece of the woman who owns the home. He knows that nothing can come of his feelings for Julia, but when he learns that she is engaged to a man Si knows will destroy her life, he does his best to make sure that their marriage will never happen. 

“Observe, don’t interfere: It was a rule easy to formulate and of obvious necessity at the project…where the people of this time were only ghosts long vanished from reality nothing remaining of them but odd-looking sepia photographs lying in old albums or in nameless heaps shoved under antique-store counters in cardboard boxes. But where I was now, they were alive. Where I was now, Julia’s life wasn’t long since over and forgotten; it still lay ahead. And was as valuable as any other. That was the key: If in my own time I couldn’t stand by and allow the life of a girl I knew and liked to be destroyed if I could prevent it, I finally knew that I couldn’t do it here either."

Could Si, by dooming their potential children never to be born, be negatively impacting the future? It’s a chance he’s willing to take, but when the project bosses do a complete one-eighty and task him with doing something in the past that will have historical significance in the present, he begins to doubt himself. Now what does he do?

Time and Again would be great fun even if this were all there was to it, but there’s more. What makes the book so special, in my estimation, are all the sketches and historical photos used to illustrate the 1882 world that Si is traveling back to. (My particular favorite is a photo of the raised arm of the Statue of Liberty sitting on the grounds of Madison Square before the statue was fully assembled where it stands today.) The attention to detail makes it easy to imagine the very different New York City that Si is trying to figure out, and survive, all by himself. 

This was a successful re-read. I come away from it with a deeper appreciation for what Finney accomplished with Time and Again, if maybe a little less excitement than then I felt the first time around. And that’s on me. After all, I was in my twenties the first time I read the book, and I’m in my seventies now. A lot has changed, not me the least. 

What I’m Reading This Week (5/11/26)

 Reading four or five books at the same time often means finishing two or three of them within a day or two of each other, and that’s what happened to me last week. I finished Time and Again, Jack Finney’s classic time travel novel, Buckeye by Patrick Ryan, and Return to Sender, book number 21 in Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire series all within a few days. And while I continue to read John Chernow’s Mark Twain bio, I’ve been neglecting it for at least a week now. Instead, I’ve started three new ones all pretty much at the same time:

The Dentist is the first book in Tim Sullivan’s DS Cross series. As of the moment, there are eight books in the series, but I’m just now beginning to explore the Cross character mainly because of the tremendous enthusiasm Cathy over at Kittling: Books has been showing for the series for the last few months. I’m primarily drawn to the series because its central character, George Cross, has Asperger’s Syndrome, a condition that his fellow cops can tolerate only because of the guy’s tremendous talent for solving murders. I’m really enjoying this first book.

Godfall is just too weird to ignore. This one is a sci-fi murder mystery, and I’m not sure yet which genre is going to be most emphasized. Picture a three-mile-tall alien (who seems to be dead) crashing into a remote part of Nebraska. The sheriff of Little Springs now has to contend with all the government agents, scientists, and cult weirdos who descend on his little town - along with a string of murders that seem to somehow be connected to the town’s newly arrive giant resident. I’ve only read the opener so far, but I find Van Jensen’s writing style very comfortable and I’m looking forward to getting deeper in…soon.

I’ve only read two or three Cormac McCarthy novels, but have been meaning to revisit his work again for a while now. I picked up this copy of Blood Meridian last year, so it seems like a good place to jump back in. McCarthy’s prose has always seemed a little intimidating to me for some reason, but I’ve found the first three chapters of Blood Meridian not to be that way. It’s about the “Kid,” a fourteen-year-old drifter from Tennessee who stumbles into the bloody, nightmarish world that was the Texas-Mexico border in 1850. McCarthy’s books can be very brutal, and this one is no exception. 

These three are going to get the bulk of my reading time for the next week or so unless I end up abandoning one of them, something I don’t see much chance of happening with this bunch. The fun part of beginning three books within something like a three-day window is waiting to see which one, if any, ends up dominating my reading time because it hits me harder than the others. That ends up happening more times than not. I hope you all have a great reading week ahead of you. Have fun!

Buckeye (2025) - Patrick Ryan

 

Buckeye is a multi-generational family saga following the evolution of  two small town Ohio families from the 1920s to the 1980s. The book’s central character is Cal Jenkins, a young man who is born with one leg significantly shorter than the other. Still dejected because he is physically ineligible for World War II military service, Cal marries Becky, a hometown girl who sometimes is able to make minimal contact with the dead, a talent that compounds Cal’s feelings of his own inadequacy. The other family in the story is comprised of two outsiders who move to Bonhomie as adults: Margaret, who grew up in an orphanage, and Felix, who was transferred to the town after receiving a job promotion at another Ohio location. 

The two families become indelibly linked on VE Day when Margaret goes to town for some shopping and suddenly starts hearing loud chatter and cheers on the street. Sensing significant war news, she rushes into Cal’s hardware store hoping that he has a radio she can listen to the good news on. Then, in celebratory excitement, Margaret impulsively kisses Cal on her way out of the store, and that single kiss ignites a spark that will directly impact the lives of everyone in both families for at least two generations. 

Because of the risk of spoiling the novel for future readers, I’m going to stop with just those plot details.

Patrick Ryan, despite his tendency to do as much “telling” as “showing” in his storytelling, creates several memorable characters in Buckeye. Cal, because of his insecurities about not being enough of a man to fight alongside his friends and neighbors, seems very real. Becky is a goodhearted woman who finds meaning in her life by connecting the dead to those they left behind, never charging a dime for her time or services. Margaret’s coming-of-age story in the orphanage is one that deserves a novel of its own, and Felix, her husband, is a man desperately struggling to determine exactly what kind of man he wants to be for the rest of his life. Each of the four are as interesting as they are different from one another, but it is when they begin to interact that the sparks really begin to fly.

Buckeye is a novel about keeping secrets from those closest to you, and how keeping those secrets can create enough guilt, resentment, and anger to destroy the very relationships you were trying to protect in the first place. It explores the definition of masculinity and comes up with some surprising conclusions. It is about small town America during World War II, an era during which people knew their neighbors along with most of their secrets - and all the good and the bad that came with that closeness. Buckeye is a longish novel in which whatever action there is can seem to develop very slowly at times, and I considered abandoning it at one point, but the characters, and their predicament, kept me coming back. And I’m glad I did. 

Stand Proud (1984) - Elmer Kelton

 I first read Elmer Kelton’s Stand Proud sometime back in the eighties,  and that was plenty long enough ago for this re-read to feel like I was reading it for the very first time. I remembered almost no details concerning the book’s plot, and had only a general memory of how much I enjoyed the story the first time around. It turns out that Stand Proud explores a theme that Larry McMurtry and quite a few other writers of westerns have explored in their own fiction over the years: what happens to violent men who outlive their usefulness to society once times have changed for the better. 

Frank Claymore is one of those men.

During the Civil War, Frank had been one of the young militia men who stayed home to protect Texas settlers from the deadly raids of the Comanche Indians who were still not willing to cede Texas to the newcomers. The situation was so desperate that the Confederacy had to stop conscripting men from that part of the state so that the small farms and ranches could survive the war years. Twenty-two-year-old Frank was one of those small ranchers himself, but all able-bodied men were required to put time in with the militia - and he put in more than most.

Frank came out of the war years with three things: a wound that would plague him the rest of his life, the location of a remote grassland valley that he would claim for himself, and a mortal enemy and competitor for everything he held dearest. 

And now, over 40 years later, Frank sits in a courtroom to be judged by a jury composed of small ranch owners who resent him and all he has claimed for himself. He is accused of murder, but is still determined to play by his own rules, damn the consequences. And it’s not looking good for him.

Each chapter of Stand Proud opens on a day of Frank’s trial, followed by a longer section from Frank’s past. This allows the reader to compare the young Frank Claymore to the elderly version, and to learn the truth, in detail, about what is being testified to in the courtroom. This construction works remarkably well to explain what kind of man Frank is and why someone as respected as he once was could find himself in a mess like this one so near the end of his life. 

Stand Proud is nothing like the stereotypical pulp fiction western readers unfamiliar with the genre too often think of when they think “western” novel. This is a character-driven story in which relationships and longtime grudges drive all the action, a story where disagreements are more likely to be settled by fists rather than by guns. Kelton’s later novels, such as The Time It Never Rained, The Day the Cowboy’s Quit, and The Good Old Boys brought ever more realism to his stories about the cowboying life and its relationship to an ever-changing Texas landscape. The Western Writers of America once went so far as to proclaim Kelton “the greatest Western writer of all time.” I might not go quite that far in my praise of the man, but I will tell you that his fiction has entertained me for a long, long time. And that I appreciate him. 

An American Outlaw (2013) - John Stonehouse

 An American Outlaw is the first book in John Stonehouse’s popular series featuring US Marshal John Whicher. There are now eight books in the series, including one novella, with the latest novel Wolves of the Evening, having just been published in March 2026. This is my first exposure to the series so I don’t know how typical An American Outlaw is to the other seven books, but I’ve been told that Stonehouse writes them as standalone stories that can be read in any order the reader prefers. 

In this first one, Gulf War veteran Gilman James (a distant relative of the famous outlaw Jesse James) comes home to find that two of his childhood buddies never recovered from the mental and emotional wounds they suffered in the same war. They are broken men, and James wants to help them. But that takes money, lots of it, because no one else seems much willing to give these men the kind of help they have every right to expect from a grateful nation. 

James is a man with few prospects of his own, but he will do whatever it takes to get his hands on however much money it takes to help his friends put their lives back together. The icing on the cake is that he plans to steal all of that money from the very people who have directly made their lives so much worse than they should be. James and his two buddies start a series of armed robberies in Lafayette, Louisiana that all falls apart in a little West Texas bank, and now US Marshal John Whicher, along with numerous other law enforcement officers, is determined to stop the men before they can cross the Mexican border. 

Whicher is a veteran investigator who tries to stay one jump ahead of whomever he’s chasing by getting inside their heads deeply enough to anticipate their next move. That skill works well for him but sometimes, as in this case, Whicher can become too empathetic for his own good. And that’s dangerous.

An American Outlaw is a shoot-em-up manhunt story in which the action seldom slows down. Along the way, though, Stonehouse effectively visits the themes of war’s toll on those who do the actual fighting, loyalty, and the gray areas between guilt and innocence. John Stonehouse gives his readers a lot to think about between the gunshots.