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.'

The first book in the Wolfe family series

SHORTLISTED FOR THE CWA GOLDSBORO GOLD DAGGER

'Blake's literary badlands are uniquely his own' - GQ

Eddie 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 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.'

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'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' - James Sallis

'For anyone who has never experienced the exceptional talent of the idiosyncratic Blake, this is a wonderful novel to start with... Passionate, bloody and yet incredibly romantic, it is a tribute to the genius of its author' - Daily Mail