There are many things I like. Some I like because they are good. Some are easy. Some are pleasant. Some like me back. Then, some things just fit. I like them because they fit and I find myself not even thinking about why. Growing up, I loved all kinds of movies--Swashbucklers, Crime Noir, Musicals, Costumers and Biographies and more. But the genre that fit me best was Westerns. Especially the ones with the heroes of few words played against sprawling natural vistas that spoke volumes about what it meant to do the right thing, to be the hero. And despite changing fashions and tastes in the intervening decades since I so raptly watched Gary Cooper, James Stewart and John Wayne, the love of that Western sensibility has remained, though often buried, a part of me. I think that is why when I first saw the ads for the TV series Longmire I felt that I had been there before. And when the show went on hiatus I sought out the books. Craig Johnson captures what I was drawn to, am drawn to. The quiet understood bond between old friends. Drawing strength from the lands where you live and paying back that tab with the understanding that your spirit belongs to the land. Across this the author plays out the crimes of men creating a kind of western noir alternating the high lonesome of the Wyoming mountains with the kind of shadows that can only come from neon lit saloons where the clients pour down their troubles and then look for more. THE COLD DISH is a marvelous introduction to Walt Longmire with equal parts humor and tragedy, the former as a brace against the latter.