10 Authors That Fans of the Longmire Mysteries Won’t Want to Miss

Named one of the best books of 2017 by PopSugar, this “thrilling Western unlike any you’ve read before” (Vulture) takes place in an unlikely town—one populated by criminals and witnesses who have been given a second chance. As murder rocks the sleepy town, however, deadly secrets simmer to the surface in this “thriller for fans of Westerns, Cormac McCarthy, and the Coen brothers” (Dallas Morning News), from Edgar Award-nominated author Adam Sternbergh.

With Coyote Wind, Peter Bowen introduced readers to Gabriel Du Pre, “a fresh, memorable character” who “take[s] the antihero of Hemingway and Hammett and [brings] him up to date” (New York Times Book Review). 

Officially, Du Pre is the cattle inspector for Toussaint, Montana, but when the sheriff offers him gas money to investigate a plane that wrecked in the desert decades ago, he finds himself embroiled in a murder mystery that stretches back for a generation in this book that’s the first in a popular series of Montana mysteries.

An Edgar Award nominee, The Distant Dead is “a breathtaking read, with flawed and authentic characters who hit so close to home that at times it is impossible not to root for them” (San Francisco Chronicle). 

Named a best book of the year by BookPage, People magazine, Parade, and Crime Reads, this page-turning book begins when a sixth grader finds a body burning in the Nevada desert. The body belongs to Adam Merkel, a math teacher who came to Lovelock, Nevada just a few months before, and the secrets surrounding his death will rock the town to its core.

Steven F. Havill began his series of Posadas County Mysteries all the way back in 1991, and since then has written more than two dozen books in the hit series starring Bill Gastner and Estelle Reyes-Guzman. 

The books can be read in any order, and Red, Green, or Murder is a great place to start, as former sheriff Bill Gastner is now a livestock inspector who’s trying to enjoy a quiet life, until one of his friends winds up dead, and he becomes embroiled in yet another mystery in this book that Publishers Weekly hailed as “a pleasure.”

Mark Twain, America’s most legendary satirist, is best known for novels like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. But did you know that he also wrote a novel about Sherlock Holmes? Or that said novel took place during the California Gold Rush, where the great detective crosses paths with a boy with a bloodhound’s sense of smell, one who has been tasked with ruining the life of his father, who abandoned his mother sixteen years before?

How will all these crossed lives intertwine, and what do they have to do with a deadly explosion in a mining camp? With Mark Twain doing the writing, the answers are bound to be entertaining!

“Plenty of convincing action bodes well for a long and successful series.” That’s what Publishers Weekly wrote when Silver Lies was first published. And, given that the novel won the WILLA Literary Award for Historical Fiction and the Colorado Gold Award and kicked off a seven-book series of Silver Rush Mysteries, it seems like they must have been right. 

In 1879, the Colorado town of Leadville is the center of a boom in precious metals, but while some people are getting rich, others are getting murdered, and it’s up to saloon-owner Inez Stannert to get to the bottom of things.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Big Sky and The Way West brings to life a “tightly plotted, beautifully worked-out example of the detective story” (New York Times Book Review), in a tale of crime and detection as big as the Montana sky, populated by characters “as real as your neighbors” (Kansas City Star). 

The resulting series won Guthrie a Silver Spur Award, as well as recognition from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, and this is the perfect place to get started.

The sequel to The Rock Hole, named one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2011, the “cinematic characters” in this Red River Mystery “walk off the page and talk Texas” (Dallas Morning News). It seems that a killer has come to the town of Center Springs, Texas. One who has already carved a path of destruction through Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. 

Now, he’s holed up in an abandoned Cotton Exchange warehouse that he has transformed into a deadly maze of booby traps. Can former constable Ned Parker, his nephew Cody, and Deputy John Washington stop the elusive killer, or will they fall victim to his dangerous lair?

The basis for John Huston’s Academy Award-winning film of the same name, this one-of-a-kind adventure novel by the mysterious author known only as B. Traven could “command as much reverence … as … Henry David Thoreau,” (Los Angeles Times). 

The story follows three men who are searching for gold in Mexico, with all the tension and psychological insights that were the hallmarks of Traven’s books, according to Hugo Award-winning author John Anthony West.

“Birtcher takes readers on an exciting ride” in this “fast-moving series launch” (Publishers Weekly), that has been positively compared to the Longmire Mysteries. Ty Dawson is a veteran of the Korean War who loves running his family’s cattle ranch in Oregon. 

But the world around him is changing in 1973, and he finds himself mixed up in more of it than he would like as he is pressed into service as an undersheriff to help investigate a string of mysterious cattle deaths and the murder of a cowhand in this book that kicked off a hit series.