ARTHUR HERBERT
The award-winning author of The Bones of Amoret returns with an atmospheric locked room mystery that immerses readers in the sprawling, lawless deserts along the Texas-Mexico border.
Abby Huxford’s business card says she’s a young literary agent at a boutique New York agency, but she jokes it ought to say “Professional Babysitter” given the energy she expends on wunderkind author Rulo Gatlin, an alcoholic prodigy with a generational voice. When Rulo’s second novel is short-listed for the Pulitzer, Abby arranges a secluded writing retreat for the self-taught genius in the desert outside the Texas border town of Amoret. There the tortured savant hunkers down in a primitive cabin to craft his highly anticipated third novel with a battered manual typewriter and his demons.
On the day she’s scheduled to pick up the completed manuscript, Abby arrives at the cabin only to find it locked from inside. Forced to break in, her shadow falls on Rulo’s corpse, dangling from a noose as he looks down in death at the finished pages of the third book. But all is not as it seems. Alongside Sheriff Lloyd McHenry, Abby’s search to discover the truth behind Rulo’s last days leads to a darker place than she could have imagined as pulling at loose threads unravels a shroud over one of the town’s ugliest secrets: a real-life murder mystery.
With vivid characters and masterful plotting, Herbert’s twist-filled whodunnit will keep you guessing to the very last page.
**2023 Chanticleer International Book Awards - 1st place, Best suspense/thriller novel**
**2022 NYC Big Book Award Winner- Best Western Novel; Finalist- Best Mystery Novel**
**2022 American Book Fest Winner- Best New Fiction; Finalist- Best Mystery Novel**
**2022 Hollywood Book Festival Finalist- Best Genre Novel**
An unconscious drug mule in the lawless desert. A decaying marriage where love is a phantom limb. The savage murder of a possible witness. Rivalry. Betrayal. It’s a new day along the border, one where the clandestine has moved out of the shadows and asserted itself with muscles that announce to the world: the rules are different now.
Amoret, Texas, 1982. Life along the border is harsh, but in a world where cultures work together to carve a living from the desert landscape, Blaine Beckett lives a life of isolation. A transplanted Boston intellectual, for twenty years locals have viewed him as a snob, a misanthrope, an outsider. He seems content to stand apart until one night when he vanishes into thin air amid signs of foul play.
Noah Grady, the town doctor, is a charming and popular good ol’ boy. He’s also a keeper of secrets, both the town’s and his own. He watches from afar as the mystery of Blaine’s disappearance unravels and rumors fly. Were the incipient cartels responsible? Was it a local with a grudge? Or did Blaine himself orchestrate his own disappearance? Then the unthinkable happens, and Noah begins to realize he’s considered a suspect.
From the bestselling author of The Cuts that Cure comes an atmospheric mystery set on the Texas-Mexico border where a small town grapples with its bloody loss of innocence. Paced like a lit fuse, this riveting whodunnit will keep you guessing all the way to its shocking conclusion.
From its attention-grabbing first sentence, Arthur Herbert's debut novel shows why he is one of the most exciting new voices in the suspense genre.
Alex Brantley is a surgeon whose desperation to start a new life outside of medicine leads him to settle in a sleepy Texas town close to the Mexican border, a town that has a dark side. Its secrets and his own past catch up with him as traits he thought he'd buried in the deserts on the frontiers of the border rise up again to haunt him.
To the citizens of Three Rivers, Henry Wallis appears to be a normal Texas teenager: a lean, quiet kid from a good family whose life seems to center around running cross-country, his first girlfriend, and Friday night football. That Henry is a cultivated illusion, however, a disguise he wears to conceal his demons. Both meticulous and brutally cruel, he manages to hide his sadistic indulgences from the world, but with that success, his impulses grow stronger until one day when a vagrant is found murdered.
When Alex and Henry's paths cross, it starts a domino effect which leads to mangled lives and chilling choices made in the shadows along la frontera, where everything is negotiable.
**2022 NYC Big Book Award Winner: Best Short Story Collection**
In this award-winning collection of short fiction, you’ll read about two women on a lonely road trip through the West Texas desert who stumble across a finding that chills them to their cores ("Sisters"), a ten-year-old boy who sets out to prove there's nothing in the town of Amoret's most famous haunted house ("Dead Snakes"), a Depression-era railroad worker whose midnight rounds set off a chain reaction of events that will change his life forever ("The Railyard Man"), an undergraduate in the midst of an affair with her professor who fears telling him her secret while suspecting he has one of his own ("Small Lies, Big Secrets"), and more. Some characters are dark, some funny, some cynical, some noble, but all are absolutely authentic and memorable. Come discover what burbles up from the darkness of Arthur Herbert's vivid imagination...