J. Todd Scott Books

The vicious Mexican cartel war boils over into the Big Bend in the explosive new novel from the author of The Far Empty and High White Sun.In the Mexican borderlands, a busload of student protesters is gunned down in broad daylight, a violent act blamed on the Nemesio cartel. But its aging leader, Fox Uno, sees the attack for what it is: another salvo in the long-running battle for control of Nemesio itself; perhaps by a rival cartel, or maybe someone closer to home...Across the Rio Grande, Sheriff Chris Cherry and his deputies America Reynosa and Danny Ford find themselves caught in Fox Uno's escalating war with the recent discovery of five dead men at the river's edge. But when El Paso DEA agent Joe Garrison's own Nemesio investigation leads him into the heart of the Big Bend, he's not ready to accept the cartel leader's retreat or defeat. Not only does he suspect a high-profile drug task force in a neighboring county is corrupt, he can't shake lingering doubts about the loyalty and motives of the young deputy, Ame Reynosa. And he won't let Sheriff Cherry ignore them either.In this pitiless land it's kill or be killed, where everyone will make one final bloody stand to decide the fate of Nemesio, the law in the Big Bend, and most of all, the future of America Reynosa.

A blistering crime novel of the opioid epidemic--and its cops, villains, and victims--written by a twenty-five-year veteran of the DEA. Angel, Kentucky: Just another one of America's forgotten places, where opportunities vanished long ago, and the opioid crisis has reached a fever pitch. When this small town is rocked by the vicious killing of an entire infamous local crime family, the bloody aftermath brings together three people already struggling with Angel's drug epidemic: Trey, a young medic-in-training with secrets to hide; Special Agent Casey Alexander, a DEA agent who won't let the local law or small-town way of doing things stand in her way; and Paul Mayfield, a former police chief who's had to watch his own young wife succumb to addiction. Over the course of twenty-four hours, loyalties are tested, the corrupt are exposed, and the horrible truth of the largest drug operation in the region is revealed. And though Angel will never be the same again, a lucky few may still find hope.

As the law in Big Bend County, Sheriff Chris Cherry is struggling to remake and modernize his department while staring down a town unwilling to change and the harsh limits of his badge. But it's only when a local river guide is brutally and inexplicably murdered that the novice sheriff truly understands just how tenuous his hold on that badge really is. And nothing can prepare Chris for the high cost of crossing dangerous men such as John Wesley Earl--a general in the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas and the partiarch of a murderous clan that's descended on Chris's hometown of Murfee--or Thurman Flowers, a part-time pastor and full-time white supremacist hel-bent on founding his violent Church of Purity in the very heart of the Big Bend. Before long, Chris and his team are outmaneuvered, outnumbered, and outgunned--inexorably drawn into a nearly twenty-year vendetta that began with a murdered Texas Ranger on a dusty highway, and that can only end with fire, blood, and bullets in Murfee's own sun-scorched streets ..

“[So] good I wish I’d written it. The poetic and bloody ground of west Texas has given birth to a powerful new voice in contemporary western crime fiction.”—Craig Johnson, New York Times bestselling author of the Walt Longmire series In this gritty crime debut set in the stark Texas borderlands, an unearthed skeleton will throw a small town into violent turmoil. Seventeen-year-old Caleb Ross is adrift in the wake of the sudden disappearance of his mother more than a year ago, and is struggling to find his way out of the small Texas border town of Murfee. Chris Cherry is a newly minted sheriff’s deputy, a high school football hero who has reluctantly returned to his hometown. When skeletal remains are discovered in the surrounding badlands, the two are inexorably drawn together as their efforts to uncover Murfee’s darkest secrets lead them to the same terrifying suspect: Caleb’s father and Chris’s boss, the charismatic and feared Sheriff Standford “Judge” Ross. Dark, elegiac, and violent, The Far Empty is a modern Western, a story of loss and escape set along the sharp edge of the Texas border. Told by a longtime federal agent who knows the region, it’s a debut novel you won’t soon forget.