Crude Intentions: A Carl Weller Mystery

In West Texas, the money runs deeper than the oil.Carl Weller didn't sign up to save anybody's politics. He signed up for four days' pay, guarding a communist nobody expected to win a Texas Senate seat. Then five gunmen turned a Marfa campaign rally into a killing floor, and the job Weller took for the money became the job he can't walk away from.The candidate's martyred campaign manager hires Weller and his old poker buddy, ex-Ranger Roy Delgado, to run their own investigation - she says she doesn't trust the Rangers, the Bureau, or ICE to do it right. What she doesn't say is why every lead she hands them ends in a body that can't talk.The trail runs through a biker gang's roadhouse, a rancher who won't sell his family's water at any price, and a business card with nothing on it but a phone number - straight into a fortune big enough to buy a Senate seat and clean enough to never show up on paper. By the time Weller understands who's really running the table, he's not sure justice and a conviction are the same thing anymore.CRUDE INTENTIONS is a hard-boiled mystery about land, water, and the kind of people who'll burn a movement to the ground to build something with better margins.William Paxson is the author of the Carl Weller mysteries BLOOD IS THICKER and CRUDE INTENTIONS, as well as THE CURIOUS CASE OF DR. LUCAS and THE HOME RUN.