A Serpent's Tooth and Spirit of Steamboat (Craig Johnson)
En général, j'aime beaucoup les enquêtes du shérif Longmire. Mais j'ai trouvé que celle-ci était particulièrement réussie. Au début, je me demandais encore à quoi servait Vic. Son personnage est un peu plus développé dans ce roman. Elle ne fait pas que dire des gros mots. Même si je n'aime toujours pas son personnage, je l'apprécie plus. Mais, c'est surtout la toile de fond du roman que j'ai aimée. Craig Johnson évoque ici ces sectes mormones dirigées par des quinquagénaires qui épousent des gamines. (Les journaux ici parlaient beaucoup dans les années 2000 de l'Eglise fondamentaliste de Jésus-Christ des saints des derniers jours et de son dirigeant Warren Jeffs, arrêté en 2006. En effet, des groupes étaient installés dans le Colorado.) Cord, le « héros » de cette histoire, est un des garçons perdus, ces jeunes hommes excommuniés pour faute (être plus jeunes que les dirigeants de la secte certainement). La naïveté de Cord est attendrissante et parfois drôle (par exemple, sa passion pour la cassette vidéo de Flicka). Craig Johnson ne laisse planer aucun doute sur ce qu'il pense de cette secte. Il est sans pitié pour les dirigeants (qui sont très naïfs également), un peu plus indulgent pour les enfants et les jeunes gens.
J'ai trouvé ce neuvième livre génial (vraiment !). En prime, Henry est très présent.
http://www.craigallenjohnson.com/
It’s homecoming for the Durant Dogies when Cord Lynear, a Mormon ‘lost boy’ forced off his compound for supposedly rebellious behavior, shows up in Absaroka County. Without much guidance, divine or otherwise, Sheriff Walt Longmire, his second-in-command Victoria Moretti, and his good friend Henry Standing Bear search for the boy’s mother and find themselves in a high plains scavenger hunt that ends at the barbed wire doorstep of an interstate polygamy group. Run by the four-hundred pound Roy Lynear—Cord’s father—the group is frighteningly well-armed and very good at keeping secrets.
Meanwhile, Walt’s got Cord locked up for his own good, but the Absaroka County jailhouse is getting crowded since the arrival of Cord’s self-appointed bodyguard, a delusional but dangerously spry old man who claims to be the now two-hundred-year old Orrin Porter Rockwell, Man of God, Son of Thunder, blessed by Joseph Smith himself. And to make life more complicated, things are heating up between Walt and his under-sheriff Vic, and she doesn’t take kindly to Walt’s new habit of sleeping in the jail to keep an eye on things.
As Walt, Henry and Vic pursue the Lynears, butting heads with the well-armed zealots, they hear whispers of Big Oil and the CIA and find they might be dealing with more than they bargained for.
Spirit of Steamboat est un conte de Noël, hommage aux aviateurs de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, représentés par l'ancien shérif, Lucian Connally. Celui-ci est le seul à pouvoir piloter un bombardier B-25 Mitchell, l'unique avion disponible pour évacuer vers Denver une petite fille victime d'un accident de la route. Les conditions météo sont impossibles : un blizzard sévit dans la région. L'équipement médical dans l'avion est limité. Walt Longmire doit donc assister les pilotes (la copilote est très attachée au Spirit of Steamboat qu'elle est en train de restaurer. Ai-je besoin de préciser que l'avion n'est pas tout à fait au point ?) dans le cockpit et le docteur à l'arrière de l'appareil. Notre shérif se démène beaucoup. Et j'ai trouvé que c'était un peu exagéré : quand il termine d'un côté, il doit se précipiter de l'autre. A part ça, bon suspense.
Qui était Steamboat ?
Extrait :
Solid black with three white stockings, the horse enjoyed parades and Wild West shows, where he was known to keep time to the music the bands played: but, docile while being handled, there was something he could not abide—riders. The bucker would not allow a man to say on top of him, and, rapidly becoming the toast of stock providers, he performed in every major rodeo in the United States for years.
There is a great deal of controversy as to who the rider is on the license plate, from Jake Maring and Guy Holt to Stub Farlow, but there is no controversy as to the fact that none of them ever rode the horse known as the Lord of the Plains or the King of the Hurricane Deck to a standstill. Allen True captured the spirit of the animal for the princely sum of seventy-five dollars when Secretary of State Lester C. Hunt commissioned him to depict the horse and rider as the design for the 1936 Wyoming license plate.
http://www.craigallenjohnson.com/
Sheriff Walt Longmire is reading A Christmas Carol in his office on December 24th when he’s interrupted by the ghost of Christmas past: a young woman with a hairline scar across her forehead and more than a few questions about Walt’s predecessor, Lucian Connally. Walt doesn’t recognize the mystery woman, but she seems to know him and claims to have something she must return to Connally. With his daughter, Cady, and his undersheriff Vic Moretti in Philadelphia for the holidays, Walt is at loose ends, and despite the woman’s reticence to reveal her identity, he agrees to help her.
At the Durant Home for Assisted Living Lucian Connally is several tumblers into his Pappy Van Winkle’s and swears he’s never clapped eyes on the woman before. Disappointed, she whispers “Steamboat” and begins a story that takes them all back to Christmas Eve 1988, when three people died in a terrible crash and a young girl had the slimmest chance of survival . . . back to a record– breaking blizzard, to Walt’s first year as sheriff, with a young daughter at home and a wife praying for his safety . . . back to a whiskey-soaked World War II vet ready to fly a decommissioned plane and risk it all to save a life.
Back to the Spirit of Steamboat.
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