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BORDER WAR is also available as a audiobook read by Jeff Gurner. Listen to an excerpt !

Lou Dobbs, an eminent broadcast figure and author, and James O. Born, a major author who has been a member of the DEA and is currently an agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, have teamed up to present us with a novel set in the area of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

The Mexican side is rife with crimes including high murder rates due to the presence of drug cartels shipping to the United States. It is also an area with a huge percent of undocumented Mexicans trying to cross the border to work in the U.S.

Tom Eriksen, an agent for the FBI, was involved with some violence when he worked in the Eastern US and has been transferred to El Paso as “punishment” for his screw up. He knows that he has to redeem himself if he is to remain in the bureau. When an investigation ends in a murde,r Tom is assigned to cover the case, and when his partner is also killed he knows that he must take charge of the cases or lose all credibility and possibly be fired.

Tom teams up with two beautiful women working for allied agencies and assigned to helping solve the killings. The investigation moves through corruption and possible betrayal by a member of Tom’s team bringing up a drug warlord and the work of a computer manufacturer using shady practices to grow itself against huge rivals.

The writing is crisp, very fast, jumping from one situation to the next. Tom’s relationship with the two women helping him moves towards an affair with one, and interest in the other. There is no doubt that this is the first book of others to come involving the same characters and bringing the authors’ knowledge of the problems on the border to life. Well done, and very well worth keeping on eye out for the next novel involving these characters and their interactions with each other, and the criminals they hunt.

5/14 Paul Lane

BORDER WAR by Lou Dobbs & James O. Born. Forge Books (May 6, 2014). ISBN 978-0765327710. 336p.

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Six friends at Pitt started a game their freshman year. By the time the year came to an end, only five of them remained. But the game didn’t end there. Over a decade later it’s time for the next round to begin and this time they’ll have to play to the finish.

Christopher J. Yates’s debut is full of suspense and charged atmosphere.

First there is the game: one of dares and humiliation – what could go wrong there, right? Of course the stakes have to get higher to ensure the game doesn’t lose momentum and the “friends” begin to wonder if they were ever friends at all.

But Yates also tells the tale in a dual storyline – one from the characters’ freshman year and one fourteen years later. The identity of narrator in the present day thread is quite cleverly hidden from the reader initially. And when that person is revealed the reader begins to realize just how unreliable he or she may be.

Both the elements of the game and the way Yates’s characters play out make Black Chalk a deliciously wicked read, one that leaves the reader on edge right until the very last page.

5/14 Becky Lejeune

BLACK CHALK by Christopher J. Yates. Random House UK (April 1, 2014). ISBN 978-1846557286. 352p.

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After a five year hiatus due to a horrific auto accident, Greg Iles returns with what is undoubtedly his masterpiece, a book that is announced as the first of a trilogy.

Iles uses the Cage family, featured in many of his novels, as the vehicle to tell a monumental story of the old south from the 1970s until about the Katrina hurricane. Penn Cage’s father, Tom has been a doctor ministering to both whites and blacks for many years. He had, in the past, a short lived affair with his Afro American nurse, Viola Turner, who rather than compromising Tom’s marriage left the area to move to Chicago. Viola was raped by men belonging to a secret group within the Ku Klux Klan before leaving Mississippi for Chicago. Many years later she was dying of cancer. She returned to tell Tom and others that she had had a child in Chicago.

The question later arises if the child is Tom’s or as a result of the group rape. Viola dies and examination indicates that she did not pass away as a result of the cancer. Enemies of Tom Cage accuse him of murder citing the possibility of a mercy killing to ease Viola’s pain.

Penn Cage, the mayor of Natchez, takes on the task of proving that his father is not guilty of any crime, and in undertaking the investigation opens up a long history of criminal activity, including murder by the “Double Eagles,” the group within the KKK led by one of the richest and most powerful men in Mississippi. Iles takes us into an era when blacks were second class citizens and crimes against them were not considered in the same vein as against whites. Complete segregation was enforced by hate groups openly pursuing the practice and it appears that Penn’s task will involve opening the past in order to prove his father innocent of murder.

Natchez Burning is over 800 pages in length but proves to be completely engrossing, forcing the reader to continue reading far into the night. The book solves several problems, first of which is to prove Tom Cage innocent of murder but leaves many other details for the second and third book. This novel can be read as a stand alone, and is very satisfying as is, but does leave room for the other areas to be detailed in the following novels. Great book, extremely well done and certainly a return to normal for Iles.

4/14 Paul Lane

NATCHEZ BURNING by Greg Iles. William Morrow (April 29, 2014). ISBN 978-0062311078. 800p.