Before I finished Chapter 1 I was laughing with tears running down my cheeks. I love funny books – I can be reading a gritty and noir tale of murder and mayhem,  but if there’s a line of humor I’ll snatch it and laugh.  (See The Ice Harvest by Scott Phillips.) Junkyard Dogs isn’t as gritty or noir as The Ice Harvest,  but it’s definitely funnier so I laughed but it’s also more violent with raw violence. Still, that seriously violent part wasn’t until the very end so even when I lost my place while sleeping (with an audio book) and had to keep restarting at about Chapter 4,  I laughed. (Mixed review, huh?)

Junkyard Dogs
by Craig Johnson 
2010 – 320 pages
Read by George Guidell 7h 33m
Rating – A for the humor/ crime 
(Both read and listened) 

First the 72-year old  Geo Stewart, aka Grampus, is found wounded after being tied to a pickup truck and dragged a few yards off a roof and down the road, which is when he crashed into a car.  Longmire inquires about that for awhile and we meet Duane Stewart and his new wife Gina -dumb as rocks.  Seems Gina took off in the car unaware that it was tied to Grampus and his cleaning equipment and so she kept going.  She was pulled over by the undersheriff only after Grampus had been run over twice.  He manages to stay alive after that but he’s in the hospital as long as they can hold him.

But for Longmire there’s a little neighborhood feud going on between a local rancher/land owner and Grampus. Longmire is trying to settle matters quietly, but then a human thumb is found in an old ice chest in the junkyard. So where is the body or at least the other limbs and appendages? Surely they’ll turn up. But that’s when the actual deaths start. These are murders which have to be investigated and there is some other criminal activity going on.
 
This isn’t a new book, but I’ve heard/read a lot about it and it’s supposed to be one of the very best of the series.  It’s book #6 out of what has grown over the years to be a total of 17 novels with another one due in September 2022. 

I’ve read only two of the whole series, but I continued to be interested in the Longmire books in general and this one in particular and it turned up from the library right on time.  

 I’ve been told there is a certain literary element to Johnson’s works and I see it but I’m not going to be a big fan mostly because there’s too much raw violence.  

https://www.curledup.com/junkdogs.htm