Book review: A young Walt Longmire battles animal and human predators on Alaska’s North Slope

In December, 1970, Walt Longmire, back in the United States after fighting in Vietnam, was working security for an oil company on Alaska’s North Slope. There, he found himself battling predators, both animal and human, in brutal weather conditions.

Now, after his career as sheriff of fictional Absaroka County, Wyo., comes to an end, Longmire tells the decades-old tale to a friend. The result is “Tooth and Claw,” the second short novel (the other being “First Frost,” published last May) in which Craig Johnson adds flesh and muscle to the backstory of a character featured in 21 novels and the TV series “Longmire” that spanned six seasons on A&E and Netflix.

The action begins when Longmire accompanies U.S. Geological Survey researchers on a flight to a remote pack of frozen sea ice. Things go bad from the start when an enormous polar bear kills and eats a member of the team. Then it gets worse.
A sudden blizzard forces the team to seek shelter in their small plane. Plunging temperatures cause equipment, including some of their weapons, to malfunction. Powerful winds tear the plane from its moorings and send it skittering upside down across the ice. The ice cracks, threatening to drop the plane into the sea. And the bear, whose white coat makes him all but impossible to see in the landscape of snow and ice, is still hunting them.

The crew sees salvation in the form of a ship’s hull in the near distance, but when they flee from the plane and scramble aboard, they discover that it is the SS Baychimo, a legendary ghost ship that has been floating around the arctic since it was abandoned by its crew in 1931.

They gather in the captain’s quarters, find coal to burn in a stove to keep from freezing to death and struggle to get the ship’s ancient radio working so they can summon help. But before long, they discover they are not alone. The bear found the ship first and has made it his home.

Meanwhile, the storm and the bear are not their only problems. A few greedy members of the research team have a secret agenda that puts Longmire in further peril.

The action is nonstop in this suspenseful tale of man against nature, and the writing is so tight that the author packs more into 180 pages than many writers squeeze into 300.

DeSilva, author of the Mulligan crime novels including “The Dread Line,” reviews books for The Associated Press.