I had a quick whiz around the Internet and dug up some of
the more interesting new series to check out after binging the last season of
Longmire and turning the last page of the latest Longmire novel, Western Star... There are also any
number of ongoing series similar to Longmire starting with the brilliant Navajo
Tribal Police mysteries by Tony Hillerman. These series have been steadily
enjoyed by readers for many years, but the exposure Longmire has brought to the
genre of the modern Western has given them new exposure. I’ve listed a few of
these at the end of this post...And then there is my favorite of the bunch,
Patrick McManus’ Blight County, Idaho, Sheriff Bo Tully series. McManus never
fails to make me laugh and can string along a good shaggy dog mystery.
BORDER PATROL AGENT
DOLPH MARTINEZ SERIES
JIM SANDERSON
In the thirty years that Jim Sanderson has been writing
seriously, he has been given many labels. He went from being an "aspiring
writer" to a "working class, Texas" writer when he won the
Kenneth Patchen Prize and had his short story collection, Semi-Private Rooms, published. With the publication of his essay
collection, A West Texas Soapbox, he
became a Texas humorist and essayist. When he won the 1997 Frank Waters Prize,
he was a new "rural Southwestern literary writer." When the novel
that won that prize, El Camino Del Rio
came out with his editor's label as a "mystery" and was subsequently
reviewed in the Washington Post and New York Times as a mystery, he became a
mystery writer. With the University of New Mexico Press's publication of two
more novels, Safe Delivery and La Mordida, he became a "literary
mystery writer." With the publication of Nevin's History (Texas Tech University Press, 2004), he became a
"historical writer" or a "Western writer. 
EL CAMINO DEL RIO
Circling buzzards lead U.S. Border Patrol agent Dolph
Martinez to the corpse of a man executed in the desert…a murder that shatters
the fragile calm in a dusty, Texas town. His investigation pits him against the
Mexican Army, the DEA, big-money Houston real estate interests, a Catholic nun
who practices voodoo, a revolutionary wanted on both sides of the
border, and perhaps deadliest of all, the demons from his own, tortured past. 
LA MORDIDA
There's Death on Both Sides of the Razor's Edge...Dolph
Martinez leads a U.S. Border Patrol task force battling crime and corruption in
the empty desert borderlands of Texas and Mexico where la mordida, the payoff,
is a way of life. He's a walking embodiment of the violent, cross-cultural
clash, his soul torn between the two cultures that make him a very special
lawman in an unforgiving place. But now he's become an unwitting pawn in a dark
conspiracy that could end with his corpse among the sunbaked bones of the
border dead.
FBI SPECIAL AGENT
MANNY TANNO SERIES
C. M. WENDELBOE
C. M. Wendelboe is a sheriff’s deputy in Wyoming. He began
his law enforcement career shortly after his discharge from the Marines. He had
served successful stints as police chief, tactical team member, and other
supervisory roles for several agencies during his thirty-eight year career in
law enforcement—yet he always has felt most proud of “working the street.” He
was a patrol supervisor when he retired to pursue his vocation as a writer. In
the 1970s, he assisted federal and tribal law enforcement agencies embroiled in
conflicts with American Indian Movement activists in South Dakota towns
bordering three Indian reservations, including Pine Ridge. He now lives in Gillette, Wyoming, within a morning’s drive
of Devils Tower, Bear Butte, the Black Hills, and the Badlands—tourist sites, which are actually sacred
places to the Lakota people. The distance of geography and expanse of time has
accorded him an appreciation of their culture and spirituality. His developing
awareness of their diverse perspectives on historical and contemporary issues
is reflected in the themes of his Spirit Road Mysteries, which feature FBI
agent Manny Tanno—a Native American returning to the reservation home he
thought he left behind and finds his oldest rival now in charge of the Tribal
Police.
DEATH ALONG THE SPIRIT ROAD
The body of local Native American land developer Jason Red
Cloud is found on the site for his new resort on the Pine Ridge Reservation. A
war club is lodged in his skull-appearing as if someone may have performed a
ritual at the crime scene. FBI Special Agent Manny Tanno arrives in Pine Ridge to find
that not everything has changed since he left. His former rival, now in charge
of the Tribal Police, is just as bitter as ever, and has no intention of making
Manny's life easy. And the spirit of Red Cloud haunting Manny's dreams is not
much help either, leaving him on his own in hunting down a cold-blooded
killer-and one misstep could send him down the spirit road as well.
DEATH WHERE THE BAD ROCKS LIVE
FBI agent Manny Tanno thought he had left his tribe and the
Pine Ridge Reservation behind him years ago. But now with a cold case unearthed
in the hot plains sun, he knows that the past never really goes away. In
Badlands National Park, there is a desolate area the Lakota refer to as the
Stronghold. General Custer called it hell on earth. During World War II, the
Army Air Corps used it as a bombing range. At the end of the war, many
unexploded ordnances were swallowed up in its sweltering sands. But that’s not
all that’s buried there.
Sixty-five years after the war, the Sioux tribe has
contracted an ordnance removal company to defuse any remaining ammunition in
the Stronghold. When the company finds a human arm near a live bomb, Tanno and
the Tribal police are called to investigate. As the body is exhumed, two more
are discovered. The remains are close together, but the murders were decades
apart—and the story behind them is about to blow up.
DEATH ON THE GREASY GRASS
FBI agent Manny Tanno is taking some much needed R—and—R at
the site of the Battle of Little Big Horn. But when a death on the reservation
cuts his vacation short, he learns that the secrets of the past have a way of
stirring up trouble in the present. As a scout for the legendary General
Custer, Crow tribe member Levi Star Dancer kept a journal chronicling his
exploits from the Battle of the Greasy Grass onward. Now, the missing journal
has been found and the descendants of those mentioned in the account, including
Levi’s own, want to keep their family secrets hidden at all costs.
Manny’s trip to the Crow Agency Reservation turns out to be
ill timed when a reenactor of the Battle of Little Big Horn is killed right in
front of him. It turns out the victim was the one who found Levi Star Dancer’s
famed diary and was planning on selling it to the highest bidder. And while the
dead body is hard to miss, the coveted book is nowhere to be found. Now, Manny
has to watch his back while searching for a murderer and the missing journal,
because this slippery killer will do anything to make sure the past stays
buried.
SHERIFF CHRIS CHERRY SERIES
J. TODD SCOTT
OTHER SUGGESTED
J. TODD SCOTT
J. Todd Scott was born in rural Kentucky and attended
college and law school in Virginia, where he set aside an early ambition to
write to pursue a career as a federal agent. His assignments have taken him all
over the U.S. and the world, but a badge and gun never replaced his passion for
books and writing. He now resides in the American Southwest, and when he’s not
hunting down very bad men, he’s hard at work on his next book.
THE FAR EMPTY
In this gritty crime debut set in the stark Texas
borderlands, an unearthed skeleton will throw a small town into violent
turmoil...Seventeen-year-old Caleb Ross is adrift in the wake of the sudden
disappearance of his mother more than a year ago, and is struggling to find his
way out of the small Texas border town of Murfee. Chris Cherry is a newly
minted sheriff's deputy, a high school football hero who has reluctantly
returned to his hometown. When skeletal remains are discovered in the
surrounding badlands, the two are inexorably drawn together as their efforts to
uncover Murfee's darkest secrets lead them to the same terrifying suspect:
Caleb's father and Chris's boss, the charismatic and feared Sheriff Standford
"Judge" Ross...Dark, elegiac, and violent, The Far Empty is a modern
Western, a story of loss and escape set along the sharp edge of the Texas border.
Told by a longtime federal agent who knows the region, it's a debut novel you
won't soon forget.
HIGH WHITE SUN
Even though the corrupt Sheriff Ross is dead and gone,
outlaws still walk free, peace comes at a price, and redemption remains hard to
find...In the wake of Sheriff Stanford Ross's death, former deputy Chris
Cherry--now Sheriff Cherry--is the new "law" in Big Bend County, yet
he still struggles to escape the shadow of that infamous lawman. As Chris tries
to remake and modernize his corrupt department, bringing in new deputies,
including young America Reynosa and Ben Harper--a hard-edged veteran homicide
detective now lured out of retirement--he finds himself constantly staring down
a town unwilling to change, friends and enemies unable to let go of the past,
and the harsh limits of his badge.
But it's only when a local Rio Grande guide
is brutally and inexplicably murdered, and America and Ben's ongoing
investigation is swept aside by a secretive federal agent, that the novice
sheriff truly understands just how tenuous his hold on that badge really is.
And as other new threats rise right along with the unforgiving West Texas sun,
nothing can prepare Chris for the high cost of crossing dangerous men such as
John Wesley Earl, a high-ranking member of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas and
the patriarch of a murderous clan that's descended on Chris's hometown of
Murfee; or Thurman Flowers, a part-time pastor and full-time white supremacist
hell-bent on founding his violent Church of Purity in the very heart of the Big
Bend.
Before long, Chris, America, and Ben are outmaneuvered, outnumbered, and
outgunned—inexorably drawn into a nearly twenty-year vendetta that began with a
murdered Texas Ranger on a dusty highway outside of Sweetwater, and that can
only end with fire, blood, and bullets in Murfee's own sun-scorched streets.
CURRENT DAY WESTERN SERIES
ELLA CLAH SERIES
BY AIMÉE AND DAVID THURLO
CAITLIN STRONG SERIES
BY JON LAND
GABRIEL DU PRÉ SERIES
BY PETER BOWEN
WIND RIVER SERIES
BY MARGARET COEL
HOWARD MOON DEER SERIES
BY ROBERT WESTBROOK
GAME WARDEN JOE PICKETT SERIES
GAME WARDEN JOE PICKETT SERIES
BY C. J. BOX
