THE LAST KING OF TEXAS

When Tres Navarre, a private eye with a Ph.D. in medieval literature from UC Berkeley, is invited to take over the late Prof. Aaron Brandon’s classes halfway through the semester at the University of Texas in San Antonio, his mother is delighted that he’ll be working in a nice safe job. But five minutes after Tres sits down in Brandon’s chair, a pipe bomb blows the office apart. In investigating the attack, Tres and the detectives at his agency get drawn into an ugly mystery surrounding Aaron’s father, Jeremiah Brandon, who made his fortune building and repairing carnival rides. The “King of the South Texas Carnival Business,” as Jeremiah called himself, also made a career of exploiting his Latino employees and their wives, and relentlessly bullying his two sons. Jeremiah was shot dead with bullets from a gold-plated revolver that makes a reappearance, along with its owner, in his son’s murder. In his hardcover debut, Tres must sort out old family and gangland allegiances'including connections to his own deceased father, a county sheriff'in a plot in which blood ties strangle and friends are sold out for a kilo of heroin. A series of gunfights and brawls leave Tres’s colleague comatose, his father’s old friend shot, the professor’s widow and young son in danger, and Tres himself kidnaped and drugged. As Tres battles drug dealers, gangs, and the police to rescue the weak, discover the truth, and give the innocent a second chance, Riordan’s writing sparkles with evocative descriptions and enough tough talk to make a college dean back down.