For Wyoming Sheriff Walt Longmire (Junkyard Dogs, 2010, etc.), the pursuit of a vicious murderer through a killer ice storm in the Bighorn Mountains adds up to a cold day in hell.

Sly, elusive Raynaud Shade is a homicidal maniac and a lawman's nightmare. But at last he's been caught. The confessed slayer of a 7-year-old boy is on his way to the slammer, almost certainly for the rest of his bloodthirsty life. And he knows it. So Absaroka County Sheriff Longmire, who has him in his custody, is quite reasonably uneasy. Not only is Shade a textbook psychopath, profoundly remorseless, he's begun professing an affinity for Sheriff Walt, as if they were somehow partners in delusion, as if Walt, too, were "possessed by evil spirits" that forced him to kill on command. All of which is as unsettling to Walt as it is unavoidable, since the body of Owen White Buffalo, the dead boy in question, was discovered in Walt's jurisdiction. The transport van advances circumspectly toward its destination until, in the mind-blowing ferocity of a sudden mountain storm, the slippery Shade manages to escape. Now a complex game's afoot as lawman chases madman. Before it's played out, the Bighorns, icily nonjudgmental, will have had their way with Walt, narrowing the sanity gap.

Deft as always, but dearly missed from this stark, wintry tale is grizzled Walt's much younger lover, his feisty, tormenting, adorable girl of summer.

At the start of Johnson's stellar seventh novel featuring Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire (after Junkyard Dogs), Walt and his deputy, Santiago "Sancho" Saizarbitoria, are escorting a trio of convicts through the Bighorn Mountains to meet a convoy of federal agents and sheriffs from neighboring counties. They must determine who gets jurisdiction over a newly opened cold case: one of the convicts, Raynaud Shade, recently confessed to burying the body of a Native American boy, a relative of Walt's friend and spiritual guide, Virgil White Buffalo, in the mountains years earlier. When Shade, who's headed for death row in Utah, escapes and takes off into the wilderness with a blizzard threatening, Walt sets off alone on the killer's trail, despite Sancho's warnings that Shade is leading him into a trap. Soon Walt is past the point of no return as the snow and ice accumulate on a journey that evokes Dante's Inferno, the book Sancho is reading on the expedition. (June)