Walt Longmire Reading Order: Craig Johnson's Complete Series
June 28, 2026
Craig Johnson has been writing about Walt Longmire since 2004, and the series has grown into one of the most quietly beloved long-running crime series in American fiction. Walt is the sheriff of fictional Absaroka County, Wyoming — the least populated county in the least populated state in the contiguous US. He is a large, deliberate man who drinks Rainier beer, reads the Cheyenne mystic Black Elk, and solves murders at the edge of reservation land with the help of his best friend Henry Standing Bear.
What makes Walt Longmire different
Most crime series are set in cities. Walt Longmire is rooted in a specific, real landscape — the Bighorn Mountains, the high plains, the Wind River Reservation. Johnson actually lives in Ucross, Wyoming (population 25), and the books feel it: the geography is exact, the weather is a character, and the relationship between the white ranching community and the Northern Cheyenne and Crow nations is treated with real weight rather than as a backdrop.
The series is not particularly fast-paced. It is character-driven, wise, and very funny — Henry Standing Bear is one of the best supporting characters in crime fiction.
Reading order
The Cold Dish (2004) — Walt investigates the murder of a man who had been tried (and acquitted) for the gang rape of a Cheyenne girl. The first book establishes everything: Walt, Henry, his undersheriff Victoria Moretti, and the landscape of Absaroka County.
Death Without Company (2006) — The death of an elderly woman in the Durant Home for Assisted Living seems straightforward. It isn’t. Johnson deepens Walt’s backstory considerably in this second book.
Kindness Goes Unpunished (2007) — Walt visits his daughter Cady in Philadelphia, where she’s been attacked and left in a coma. Walt out of his element — off the high plains and into an East Coast city — is unexpectedly great.
Full Walt Longmire reading order →
Should you read in order?
Yes. Walt Longmire is not a series where each book is standalone. Walt’s relationships with his daughter Cady, his former wife’s memory, Henry, and Vic develop over many books. Significant things happen to these characters across the series and are not explained again in later books.
Start at The Cold Dish. The quality is consistent throughout — Johnson doesn’t have weak middle-of-series books — so there’s no reason to jump around.
The Netflix and A&E series
Longmire ran for six seasons — four on A&E, two more on Netflix after fan pressure brought it back from cancellation. Robert Taylor plays Walt (he’s Australian — Johnson considered this a great compliment, given how embedded the series is in American landscape). Lou Diamond Phillips plays Henry Standing Bear.
The series is a solid adaptation that compresses considerably. It changes some plot lines significantly and invents others. The biggest change: on television, Vic becomes a love interest for Walt much earlier and more explicitly than in the books. Several book plots are reversed, combined, or dropped.
Which is better? The books, easily — the landscape, Walt’s interior voice, and Henry’s dialogue don’t fully survive the translation to screen. But the show is good television, and many readers found the series through it.
Novellas and short fiction
Johnson has also published a number of Longmire novella collections alongside the main novels — short stories set in the Absaroka universe. They appear in the reading order and can be slotted in where they fall chronologically, though they’re not required reading.
If you haven’t started: The Cold Dish is one of the best debut crime novels of the 2000s. Wyoming has rarely felt so real on the page.
