The Rules of Wolfe

Longlisted for the 2015 CWA Goldsboro Gold Dagger Award

Eddie Gato Wolfe is a young, impetuous member of the Wolfe family of Texas gunrunners 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 blood-drenched Mexican drug trade, The Rules of Wolfe is another classic crime novel from a writer Entertainment Weekly calls 'one of the greatest chroniclers of the mythical American outlaw life.'



James Carlos Blake is one of America's most highly regarded living authors of historical crime fiction. He was born in Mexico to a family that moved regularly when he was a child, living in various towns along the border and coast before finally settling in Texas. After a stint in the army, Blake attended the University of South Florida and received a Master's degree from Bowling Green State University, both universities where he would later teach. In 1997 he left teaching to write full-time. Blake has written thirteen other novels and one collection of stories, most of which dealt with real-life characters from the American west. He lives and works in Arizona.



'James Carlos Blake writes with the muscularity of great pulp novels and the grace of a dancer - from the edge of an America that is forever frontier'



'Blake's literary badlands are uniquely his own'



'For readers who can stomach all-too-realistic Tex-Mex noir that explores human nature at its worst'



'Blake's customary zest for life and death makes his latest modern historical thriller violent, sexy and exciting'



'Blake's masterful action-driven narrative and his revealing look at the ultraviolent Mexican drug trade rival the best of Don Winslow and Kem Nunn'