The Last Second Chance: An Ed Earl Burch Novel

Ed Earl Burch, a cashiered vice and homicide detective, has his life as a private detective narrowed down to chasing financial fugitives from carnage of the oil and savings and loan busts of Dallas in the mid-1980s, the occasional wayward spouse and the next round of bourbon sipped with a boot on the rail of his favorite saloon.

He's an ex-jock gone to seed, with bad knees and a battered soul, trying to keep at bay the memories of three ex-wives, the violent mistakes that got him booted off the force, a dead partner and the killer who got snuffed before Ed Earl could track him down. Keep it simple. Keep the lines straight. Don't take a risk. Don't give a damn. It's the creed of the terminal burnout and he's living it a day at a time, drink by drink.

That all changes when Carla Sue Cantrell, a short blonde with ice-blue eyes and a taste for muscle cars, crystal meth and the high-wire double-cross, walks into his life, pointing a Colt 1911 at his head. She tells him his partner's killer, a drug lord working both sides of the border, is still alive. She forces him into a deadly game where Burch is framed for murder and chased by cops and the drug lord's hitman.

They're on the run through the scrubby Texas Hill Country and the high desert of El Paso and northern Mexico, gunning for the same man both want dead – the drug lord, Teddy Roy Bonafacio.

It's a simple, lethal choice – kill or be killed.

Take a waltz across Texas with Ed Earl Burch and Carla Sue Cantrell. It's one helluva dance.