In the newest Wolfe-family adventure from James Carlos Blake, Rudy and Frank Wolfe are engaging in routine miscellaneous business—some legitimate and some less so—for their family when they stumble upon a stash of high-quality pornographic films in a raid. The plot thickens when their Aunt Catalina, the family matriarch aged 115, recognizes her long-lost sister in one of the young performers. Catalina tasks the boys with tracking the girl down, however improbable a connection may be. This proves to be no simple task. Soon, Rudy and Frank find themselves moving away from world of porn and towards the upper echelons of the Sinaloa drug cartel, where the mysterious woman has become a particular favorite of the head narco. For their aunt, the woman, and themselves, Frank and Rudy must find a way to get her out without alerting the cartel. A tropical storm complicates their quest, but their sprawling family may save them from this obstacle, too. Often outrageous and...

The offspring of a whore mother and a homicidal father, Edward and John Little are driven from their home in the Florida swamplands by a sching parent's treacheries, and by a shameful, horrific act that will haunt their dreams for the rest of their days. Joining the swelling ranks of the rootless—wandering across an almost surreal bloodland populated by the sorrowfully lost and defiantly damned—two brothers are separated by death and circumstance in the lawless "Dixie City" of New Orelans, and dispatched by destiny to opposing sides in a fierce and desperate territorial struggled between Mexico and the United States. And a family bond tempered in hot blood is tested in the cruel, all-consuming fires of war and conscience.With soaring and masterful prose, James Carlos Blake brings to life an enthralling historical time and place—and a cast of memorable characters—in a stunning tale of dark instinct, blood reckoning, and fates forged in the zeal of...

From the raw clay of historical fact, James Carlos Blake has sculpted a powerful novel of both a man and an America at war with themselves. Here is the brutally honest story of free-spirit William Anderson, who is pulled into a savage conflict of state against state in the years leading up to the Civil War. When Bill suffers a catastrophic loss, a fury is unleashed in his anguished soul. He becomes the most fearsome guerrilla captain and earns a name that becomes whispered with reverence and terror: "Bloody Bill."

A page-turning epic about the making of a borderland crime family, "Country of the Bad Wolfes" will appeal both to aficionados of family sagas and to fans of hard-knuckled crime novels by the likes of Donald Pollack, Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke and James Ellroy. Basing the novel partly on his own ancestors, Blake presents the story of the Wolfe family -- spanning three generations, centering on two sets of identical twins and the women they love, and ranging from New England to the heart of Mexico before arriving at its powerful climax at the Rio Grande. Begat by an Irish-English pirate in New Hampshire in 1828, the Wolfe family follows its manifest destiny into war-torn Mexico. There, through the connection of a mysterious American named Edward Little, their fortunes intertwine with those of Porfirio Diaz, who will rule the country for more than thirty years before his overthrow by the Revolution of 1910. In the course of those tumultuous chapters in American and Mexican history, as Diaz grows in power, the Wolfes grow rich and forge a violent history of their own, spawning a fearsome legacy that will pursue them to a climactic reckoning at the Rio Grande. A master of the historical novel, James Carlos Blake has been hailed as "a poet of the damned who writes like an angel" (Donald Newlove, "Kirkus Reviews"). "Library Journal" says of Blake's latest novel that it is "brawling, high-spirited, and superbly realized ... this novel offers many pleasures, including endearing characters, unlikely love stories, and all manner of mayhem." James Carlos Blake was born in Mexico and grew up in Texas and Florida. He is the author of nine other novels and a collection of short works. Among his literary honors are the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Southwest Book Award, and the Falcon Award.

A Men's Journal, Deadly Pleasures, and Latinidad Best Book of the YearEddie Gato Wolfe is a young, impetuous member of the Wolfe family of Texas gun-runners that goes back generations. Increasingly unfulfilled by his minor role in family operations and eager to set out on his own, Eddie crosses the border to work security for a major Mexican drug cartel led by the ruthless La Navaja.Eddie falls for a mysterious woman named Miranda, whom he learns too late is the property of an intimate member of La Navaja's organization. When they're discovered, the violent upshot forces Eddie and Miranda to run for their lives, fleeing into the deadly Sonora Desert in hope of crossing the border to safety. But La Navaja's reach is far and his lust for revenge insatiable. If La Navaja's men don't kill Eddie and Miranda, the brutal desert just may. Their only hope: help from the family that Eddie abandoned.At once a riveting thriller and an inside look at the...

Hailed as "one of the greatest chroniclers of the mythical American outlaw life" (Entertainment Weekly), James Carlos Blake turns to the blazing story of Stanley Ketchel, the legendary ragtime-era middleweight boxing champion and daring rakehell, whose brief and meteoric life burned with violence and tragedy in and out of the ring. The Killings of Stanley Ketchel is a sweeping and powerful literary adventure by one of our most daring novelists.

From Publishers WeeklyAgain mining the territory of bleak lives on the fringes of society, L.A. Times Book Prize-winner Blake (In the Rogue Blood and Red Grass River) has crafted seven short stories and a novella about people surviving in the merciless borderlands dividing Mexico and the U.S. Characters from South Florida, the Gulf of Mexico and Texas are fully sculpted in Blake's visionary dystopia, their struggles neither heroic nor dishonorable. The complexity of border culture is graphically drawn, with its omnipresent threats of la migra, unemployment, bigotry and despair. Blake begins the collection with an engaging and informative introductory memoir, a chronology of his childhood in the borderlands and of his mixed Mexican/Texan heritage. The stories that follow are brutal, stark and horrifying; in "Runaway Horses," a just-widowed man is driven mad when he attempts to deliver just punishment to his wife's rapist and murderer. In another narrative, an illegal immigrant falls in love with an ex-prostitute with three children, but succumbs to his fear of commitment. Female characters suffer violently in these stories, often victims of rape, incest or murder. "Texas Woman Blues" is a searing portrait of hopelessness and horror. Dolores (dolar, pain in Spanish) experiences a lifetime of pain before her 17th birthday. Abandoned by her father, who ends up in prison, on her mother's death she is sent to live with relatives and is raped by her uncle. When she finally bolts free, the cycle of victimization expands into a bleak and unforgettable chronicle of dead-end options. Blake writes with a fearless precision and a ruthless sensibility, his prose is spare and tough, and his descriptions detailed and cinematic. This is gritty, raw, bare-knuckled fiction, blazing with an extraordinary kind of violence, and certainly not for the faint of heart. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalBlake's (In the Rogue Blood, LJ 9/1/97) first collection of short fiction begins with an autobiographical account and then turns to a series of linked fictions about poor, young, hard-working, dignified Mexican or Mexican American men, some of whom have immigrated to the United States looking for a better life. One loses his savings to a gun-toting hitchhiker, another falls for an ex-prostitute. A third becomes a boxer, only to lose a championship fight to his arrogant schoolmate. He then becomes a referee and takes his revenge. In the final story, "Texas Woman Blues," a young woman named Dolores leads a peripatetic life in hardscrabble southern Texas, the territory staked out by novelist Lionel Garc!a. Time and again men use her, until she falls in love with Buddy. Then Buddy is killed, and soon Dolores, saddled with two unloved children, commits suicide. Blake's talent is obvious, especially in the first stories, but "Texas Woman Blues" could have been longer and more developed. Recommended for literary collections and those with a Latino audience.AHarold Augenbraum, Mercantile Lib., New York Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

James Rudolph Youngblood, aka Jimmy the Kid, is an enforcer, a "ghost rider" for the Maceo brothers, Rosario and Sam, rulers of "the Free State of Galveston," who are prospering through illicit pleasures in the midst of the Great Depression. Raised on an isolated West Texas ranch that he was forced to flee at age eighteen following the violent breakup of his foster family, Jimmy has found a home and a profession in Galveston -- and a mentor in Rose Maceo. Looming over Jimmy's story like an ancient curse is the specter of his fearsome father. Their ties of blood, evident since Jimmy's boyhood, have been drawn tighter over time. Then a strange and beautiful girl enters his life and a swift and terrifying sequence of events is set in motion. Jimmy must cross the border and go deep into the brutal and merciless country of his ancestors -- where the story's harrowing climax closes a circle of destiny many years in the making.

"James Carlos Blake has long been one of my favorites, but his Wolfe family saga may be his best work to date."—Ace Atkins, on The House of WolfeLos Angeles Times Book Prize winner James Carlos Blake delves back into the dark realms of the Wolfe family, a clan whose roots run deep on both sides of the United States-Mexico border, and whose prevailing interests straddle both sides of the law. Twenty years ago, college student Axel Prince Wolfe—heir apparent to his Texas family's esteemed law firm and its 'shade trade' criminal enterprises—teamed up with his best friend, Billy, and a Mexican stranger in a high-end robbery that went wrong. Abandoned by his partners, he was captured and imprisoned, his family disgraced, his wife absconded, his infant daughter Jessie left an orphan. Two decades later, with eleven years still to serve, Axel has long since exhausted his desire for revenge against the partners who deserted him. All he wants...

On a rainy winter night in Mexico City, a ten-member wedding party is kidnapped in front of the groom's family mansion. The perpetrator is a small-time gangster named El Galán, who wants nothing more than to make his crew part of a major cartel and hopes that this crime will be his big break. He sets the wedding party's ransom at five million US dollars, to be paid in cash within 24 hours.The only captive not related to either the bride or the groom is the young Jessica Juliet Wolfe, a bridesmaid and close friend of the bride. Jessie hails from a family of notorious outlaws that has branches on both sides of the border, and when the Wolfes learn of Jessie's abduction, they fear that the kidnappers will kill the captives after receiving the ransom—unless they rescue Jessie first.Gritty and exhilarating, The House of Wolfe takes readers on a wild ride from Mexico City's opulent neighborhoods to its frenetic downtown streets and feral shantytowns, as El...

James Carlos Blake is a masterful chronicler of the restless, outcast, the lawless, and the lonelyheart. His previous novel, In the Rogue Blood, was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. Now he has written a powerful and rousing historical saga of family loyalties, blood feuds, and betrayed friendships; of bank robberies and bootlegging; and of a passionate love as wild at heart as the Everglades. It is the story of sworn enemies: John Ashley, a criminal and folk hero, the brightest star in a family destined to become the most notorious in south Florida; and Bobby Baker, a lawman born of lawmen, a violent, hard-hearted man driven by the searing memory of past affronts and the enduring hatreds the engendered. Ashley and Maker will clash many times over many decades. And as the twentieth century encroaches on their world—and the wildlands give grudging way to the rising boomtown of Miami—a feral, sensual mating will place one man in gravest peril...

Some have called him a Texas hero. Some called him the Devil himself. But on one point they all agreed: while he was alive, John Wesley Hardin was the deadliest man in Texas. A novel of uncompromising depth and power, the book recounts the wild days of Wes Hardin through the voices of those who encountered him during the forty-two years of his life. The cast is as raw and uncompromising as the writing. The Pistoleer is James Carlos Blake's fascinating debut novel. Blake uses the raw clay of historical fact and weaves a fascinating tale of the Old West.

With his debut novel on legendary Texas outlaw John Wesley Hardin, The Pistoleer, James Carlos Blake demonstrated a rare talent for western and historical fiction. His second book, The Friends of Pancho Villa, now back in print, further proved his mastery in the genre, taking on an even mightier figure of North American legend—the most memorable leader of the Mexican Revolution. Violently waged from 1910 to 1920, the revolution profoundly transformed Mexican government and culture. And Pancho Villa was its "incarnation and its eagle of a soul"—so says Rodolfo Fierro, the novel's narrator, an ex-con, train robber, and Villa's loyal friend. Killers of men and lovers of life, the revolutionaries fought for freedom, for a new Mexico, for Villa. And in return, they shared victory and death with their country's most powerful hero. The Friends of Pancho Villa is a masterpiece of ferocious loyalty, bloody revolution, and legends that live forever.

Harry Pierpont and John Dillinger were die-hard and deadly partners who made national headlines with their daring bank hold-ups and gun battles — and they had a lot of laughs while they were at it. They were known as the Dillinger Gang but at its heart was "Handsome Harry" Pierpont — tough, fearless, intelligent, and sworn to live by no law but his own. Presented as his intimate "confessions," Harry's story takes us from his teenage days as a small-time crook to his fateful meeting with the equally young Dillinger to the pinnacle of his notoriety, and to his final hours in the penitentiary death house.Crafted in James Carlos Blake's signature style of fast-paced violence, sizzling sex, and darkly raucous humor, Handsome Harry re-creates a thrilling chapter from the chronicles of American crime.

In 1928 New Orleans, eighteen-year-old Sonny LaSalle is a top prep student and champion amateur boxer -- and he venerates his fraternal twin uncles, Buck and Russell, armed robbers who love their profession. Sonny secretly believes that he, too, is a natural outlaw and persuades his uncles to take him on as a partner. But when a bank job goes bad, Sonny is sent to jail, where he unintentionally kills a policeman who is the son of the most feared lawman in Louisiana, widely known as "John Bones." After nine months in the infamous Angola penitentiary, Sonny makes a harrowing escape and manages to reunite with Buck and Russell. The carefree trio head out for the boomtowns of west Texas, where the money flows as freely as the oil, unaware that vengeance follows close behind, as the cool, calculating John Bones begins a relentless campaign to hunt down Sonny ... no matter what.