Just in case you’re wondering, we’ll be re-running some of our best and most popular book reviews every other week from now on.  They will be described as our Legacy Mysterious Book Reports.  Send us a quick request if you have a favorite that you’d like to see again and we’ll do our best to re-publish it.

Legacy Mysterious Book Report No. 4

Published March 2022 MBR 481

The Texas Job

Mysterious Book Report No. 481

by John Dwaine McKenna

As The Texas Job, (Poisoned Pen, PB, $15.99, 416 pages, ISBN 978-1-4642-1570-4), by Dallas journalist and Spur Award-winning author Reavis Z. Wortham begins, it’s 1931. The Great Depression is in full swing and one of the greatest oil discoveries in American history has just been made in the northeast corner of the state, as a young Ranger named Tom Bell trails a vicious killer up from the Rio Grande Valley to the East Texas boomtown of Pine Top . . . which sits smack-dab atop the middle of a gigantic lake of underground crude oil.  And like boomtowns everywhere, there’s honest hard-workers, some hard-drinkers, and a few hard cases, all of whom are intent on making money the  easy way . . . by stealing it.

The place is so out of control and crime-laden, that Bell discovers the body of a murdered woman at the edge of town before he even gets there.  He reports the crime and the ambush that followed to the local sheriff . . . a man named Dobbs, who takes down the details and tells Bell he’ll look into it “When he has time,” as he’s too busy with all the policing he’s already doing in the rapidly growing town.  It’s left up to Ranger Bell alone to capture or kill the elusive fugitive and murderer named Clete Ferras, who always seems to be one jump ahead of the law.  But the deeper he dives into the criminal underbelly of Pine Top, the more corruption, treachery and murder Bell finds, as he fights increasingly worse gangsters in a desperate fight for survival.  Tom Bell, is an all-American, old-fashioned hero that action and adventure enthusiasts will identify with and root for to the last page of this kinetic novel.  Then, they’ll be howling for more adventures of the iconic young Texas Ranger named Tom Bell!!

 

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