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"James Carlos Blake is a master at weaving historical fact into fiction. Two generations of Wolfe men--begat by an English pirate in New Hampshire in 1828--track their violent but manifest destiny through the Diaz Regime in Mexico in the early 1900s and back to Gulf Coast Texas. The novel centers on two sets of identical "hero twins," each with a violent history that mirror the author's belief on the primacy of violence in the evolution of civilization. Their lives are intertwined with important events through the history of the United States, beginning in the 1820s. Crucial are the histories of the infamous Saint Patrick's Battalion (revered in Mexico as "los San Patricios") who deserted the U.S. Army during the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) and the rise and fall of Porfirio Diaz Regime (1876-1910), which marked the beginning of the Mexican Revolution"--Provided by publisher.
A “gritty, raw, bare-knuckled” collection of stories set along the US-Mexico border from the LA Times Book Prize–winning author of In the Rogue Blood (Publishers Weekly). In this extraordinary collection of short fiction, James Carlos Blake, “one of the greatest chroniclers of the mythical American outlaw life” and author of the Wolfe Family series of border noir novels, journeys from the nineteenth-century Mexican frontier to the borderlands of today (Entertainment Weekly). Borderlands begins with Blake’s personal essay, “The Outsiders,” which recounts his own straddling of worlds and identities. In the following eight stories, we meet characters like Don Sebastián Cabrillo...
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A bank robber's life early this century. At 18, John Ashley, the son of a Florida bootlegger kills a man in self-defense and has to flee, beginning a life of robberies, jail, romance and more jail.
A Mexican-American convict escapes prison to find his daughter in this “gripping ride” by the Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winning author of The House of Wolfe (Arizona Daily Star). Axel Prince Wolfe was the heir apparent to his Texas family’s law firm and its ‘shade trade’ criminal enterprises. Then he took part in a robbery that went wrong. Abandoned by his partners, he was the only one caught. His family was disgraced, his wife absconded, and his infant daughter Jessie was left an orphan. Two decades later, Axel has given up his desire for revenge against his partners. All he wants is to see the woman his daughter has become, despite her lifelong refusal to acknowledge him. Wi...
"Powerful. . . impressive. . . [an] epic of the 1840s frontier." —Dallas Morning News 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 America's "Manifest Destiny." 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 scheming 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 Orleans, 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.
Often outrageous and always entertaining, the Wolfes are not to be missed. 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.
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.
American history is a complex weave of heroism and courage, conquest and carnage -- and no novelist today better understands the checkered character of our past than Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner James Carlos Blake. In prose as richly colored as an artist's palette, he again proves himself one of our most accomplished authors in this epic story set amid the Civil War's guerrilla conflict along the Kansas-Missouri borderland. Wildwood Boys Like his free-spirited father, William T. Anderson was never meant for the farming life. Born in Missouri on the coldest day of 1840, he is raised in a fiercely independent family given to the pleasures of poetry and music -- yet ever ready to defend ...
From the award-winning master of "Border Noir" comes a relentless thriller about a young man from a family of outlaws who falls for the wrong woman and ends up on the run from a ruthless drug cartel and a deadly bounty hunter.