January Read 2026

So, that time of the year again – my, time flies. For those who haven’t encountered the “January Read” thing before and have circled to this blog for the first time – quick recap.

I am not naturally someone who gravitates to the “mystery” genre, but Deck, my husband, was. He was for instance a devotee of the Travis McGee novels and owned what I think is every book in that series. I on the other hand tended to bounce off it – when Deck tried to introduce me to Tony Hillerman, for instance, the experience was akin to taking a swan dive into a frozen pond and skidding sharply and painfully off the ice. However, we started watching a TV series called “Longmire” at some point and I, for a change, found myself connecting, partly because I glommed onto the main character. Then we found out that it was based on actual books, and thus the tradition began – I would get Deck the latest Longmire book for Christmas every year, and then I myself would read it in January of the year that followed. When he died, I continued the tradition in his absence and in the past handful of years or so I’ve done the January Read by myself, on my own, in his memory.

So, then. To this January. The latest Longmire novel by author Craig Johnson, “Return to Sender” deals with Walt Longmire undertaking something of a “side quest” on behalf of a friend, tracking down a vanished local mail carrier and finding out what had happened to her when she simply stepped off the face of the planet. Turns out… there’s a Cult Out There, oh my, and Walt gets mired into woo woo fast (of course it isn’t true woo woo, it’s pure con job, but yeah, you know.) The rest of the book is basically Walt chasing his tail in the desert, getting his usual dose of hard knocks (the man is a walking collection of scars and bruises by this point), and coming up trumps at the end of it all before going off into the sunset and presumably the vehicle of the next book.

“Return to Sender” was perhaps a little predictable, although entertaining (I still like the main character and Johnson’s laconic writing style, so it isn’t a chore to read these books). But I think that the shine’s beginning to wear off, for me, a little. These mysteries were somehow different from other mysteries in that I could get into them and enjoy them – at least in the beginning – but I am starting to find my usual mystery ennui creeping in around the edges. That is to say, a mystery story at its core is some sort of whodunit (of various subgenres – the cozy, the police procedural, what have you) that depends on a basic storyline: somebody dies in a violent or semi-violent manner, a sleuth starts off investigating said death (for a range of reasons, some more plausible than others), begins a journey down a twisty road filled with red herrings (some of which are more obvious than others…), and finally straightens with  a crow of ‘Elementary my dear Watson’ and explains it all away with a fingerpointing flourish of “(s)he did it!”. It is a very rare mystery, for me, in which I had not already worked out the culprit for myself – or have ceased caring about his or her identity. I am just finding that the Longmire mysteries are now trying a little too hard, and in this particular one I found the entire cult premise, well, kind of boring. IT’S STILL A READABLE BOOK. I am likely to keep an eye out for the next book in the series and I will probably buy it and there will probably be another January Read next year… but the bar is getting lower, and I am not sure how long my attachment is going to endure.

For now, and I’ll probably do a deeper genre dive at some point, I’ll just say that it was the usual comfort to hold and to read a book the earlier incarnations of the series of which I have shared in times gone by with one whom I loved.

Happy New Year, Deck. Here’s to Longmire.

(your periodic PSA: please do join me on my Patreon for more material like this…)