For his first two novels featuring PI Tres Navarre, Rick Riordan garnered the Anthony, Shamus, and Edgar Awards--a trio that few seasoned Mystery careerists can claim. In this third, equally entertaining installment, Riordan casts Navarre according to the other piece of his quirky skill set: his Ph.D. in English literature from UC Berkeley.

While the worst-case scenario envisioned by most professors at the University of Texas at San Antonio probably involves lost essays or a failed tenure bid, recently the medievalists at UTSA have wound up deader than their favorite language. At first, the deaths seemed like accidents. Dr. Theodore Haimer was forced to take an early retirement when his remarks about "the damn coddled Mexicans at UTSA" found their way into the Express-News. Shortly thereafter, the old man was discovered deceased, his head in a bowl of Apple Jacks, the result of an apparent heart attack. His successor, the young Dr. Aaron Brandon, continued to receive the vituperation and death threats that had followed his predecessor to the grave. Then, halfway into the semester, Brandon was also found dead--murdered. Now, Tres Nevarre is the only man crazy enough to fill the vacant chair of Chaucer studies and murder avoidance at the amiable institution. His first day on the job is the clincher: an exploding package leaves him both scarred and excited for the only academic job he's ever found that rivals Indiana Jones's.

Riordan's style blends the hipness of Elmore Leonard with the sardonic humor of Janet Evanovich. And like Evanovich, Riordan draws on the colorful character of his locale--in his case the twangy chili con carnage of San Antonio academic life--to pepper his narrative with a mixture of medieval literature, Tex-Mex dialogue, and Sherlock Holmesian puzzles. While there aren't many more awards for Riordan to conquer, The Last King of Texas will certainly win him some more loyal fans. --Patrick O'Kelley


From Publishers Weekly
In a terrific sequel to The Widower's Two-Step, which won the 1999 Edgar for Best Original Paperback, the third Tres Navarre mystery finds the academic-turned-PI reluctant to accept a chair in medieval studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio, a chair whose last two tenants have met with violent deaths. But when a bomb goes off in the dean's office nearly killing him and two others, he instantly accepts the assignment. Tres quickly finds out that the second victim's father, Jeremiah Brandon, a ruthless amusement-park ride manufacturer known as the "King of the Carnivals," was also murdered years before. The prime suspect then was Jeremiah's former employee, gang member Zeta Sanchez, who believed that the predatory Jeremiah was sleeping with his wife, but Sanchez was never apprehended. Suddenly it is reported that, after years on the run (and in a Mexican jail), he has been spotted in the region. Tagging along with the San Antonio police, Tres finds himself in the middle of a violent shoot-out during which Sanchez is arrested; now he is also the number one suspect in the murder of Jeremiah's son. Not surprisingly, Sanchez vigorously protests his innocence. All this happens in just the first 40 pages of this fast-paced and highly entertaining novel, as Tres finds himself drawn into the complex vortex of the Brandon family's ugly past. With the help of beautiful yet tough homicide detective Ana DeLeon (a potential romantic interest) and other, less than savory, friends from the wrong side of the law, the wisecracking Tres untangles an intricate web of murderous family rivalries, missing persons and heroin traffic--all the while evoking with bright color the interplay of San Antonio's Latino and Anglo cultures and the joys of Tex-Mex cuisine. (Jan.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Jackson "Tres" Navarre, San Antonio P.I. and Berkeley Ph.D., returns in this third and, so far, best installment of a promising series (following Big Red Tequila and Widower's Two-Step). Here, Tres is allowed to indulge in both of his career interests. After a controversial professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio is murdered, Tres takes his place and investigates while attempting to prove himself as a teacher. Not surprisingly, the explanation behind the murder is not as simple as it first appears. Riordan weaves a tight tale, capturing the spirit of south Texas and imbuing Tres with his own peculiar flavor--evidence that his style is maturing. This is certain to please fans of the first two Navarre novels and win new ones as well. Recommended for popular fiction collections.-Craig L. Shufelt, Lane P.L., Hamilton, OH Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
When Tres Navarre, a private eye with a Ph.D. in medieval literature from UC Berkeley, is invited to take over the late Prof. Aaron Brandons classes halfway through the semester at the University of Texas in San Antonio, his mother is delighted that he'll be working in a nice safe job. But five minutes after Tres sits down in Brandon's chair, a pipe bomb blows the office apart. In investigating the attack, Tres and the detectives at his agency get drawn into an ugly mystery surrounding Aarons father, Jeremiah Brandon, who made his fortune building and repairing carnival rides. The ``King of the South Texas Carnival Business,'' as Jeremiah called himself, also made a career of exploiting his Latino employees and their wives, and relentlessly bullying his two sons. Jeremiah was shot dead with bullets from a gold-plated revolver that makes a reappearance, along with its owner, in his son's murder. In his hardcover debut, Tres must sort out old family and gangland allegiancesincluding connections to his own deceased father, a county sheriffin a plot in which blood ties strangle and friends are sold out for a kilo of heroin. A series of gunfights and brawls leave Tres's colleague comatose, his father's old friend shot, the professor's widow and young son in danger, and Tres himself kidnaped and drugged. As Tres battles drug dealers, gangs, and the police to rescue the weak, discover the truth, and give the innocent a second chance, Riordan's writing sparkles with evocative descriptions and enough tough talk to make a college dean back down. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"Raise your margarita to Rick Riordan.... This tale of revenge and remorse sizzles and skids like drops of water on a hot skillet."
-- Texas Monthly

"Starts off with a literal bang and then gathers speed from there."
-- Entertainment Weekly

"If not the king of Texas crime writing, Rick Riordan is certainly among the princes in a royal family that already includes James Lee Burke."
-- The Denver Post

"Riordan writes so well about the people and topography of his Texas hometown that he quickly marks the territory as his own."
-- Chicago Tribune

Don't miss the spicy Tex-Mex flavor of the first two Tres Navarre novels:

Big Red Tequila

Winner of the Shamus and Anthony Awards

The Widower's Two-Step

Winner of the Edgar Award

Available from Bantam Books






Review
"Raise your margarita to Rick Riordan.... This tale of revenge and remorse sizzles and skids like drops of water on a hot skillet."
-- Texas Monthly

"Starts off with a literal bang and then gathers speed from there."
-- Entertainment Weekly

"If not the king of Texas crime writing, Rick Riordan is certainly among the princes in a royal family that already includes James Lee Burke."
-- The Denver Post

"Riordan writes so well about the people and topography of his Texas hometown that he quickly marks the territory as his own."
-- Chicago Tribune

Don't miss the spicy Tex-Mex flavor of the first two Tres Navarre novels:

Big Red Tequila

Winner of the Shamus and Anthony Awards

The Widower's Two-Step

Winner of the Edgar Award

Available from Bantam Books






Book Description
Multiple-award-winning author Rick Riordan brings back smart-mouthed Texas P.I. Tres Navarre for his most dangerous case yet. If you think the academic world is deadly dull, you're half right....

The Last King Of Texas

When a controversial English professor is found shot to death, Tres Navarre--P.I. and Ph.D.--is the only local academic crazy enough to accept the emergency opening at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Police assure him they already have a suspect, so while they wrap up the open-and-shut case, all Tres has to do is teach three classes, grade on a curve...and walk in a dead man's shoes. It should be an easy assignment--but one thing Tres doesn't do is easy. When the evidence in the case starts looking a little too perfect, when the killing doesn't stop, Tres takes on some extracurricular research into the heart of an assassin--and lands in a high-stakes game of gangster honor on the
darkest streets of San Antonio's West Side....



From the Inside Flap
Multiple-award-winning author Rick Riordan brings back smart-mouthed Texas P.I. Tres Navarre for his most dangerous case yet. If you think the academic world is deadly dull, you're half right....

When a controversial English professor is found shot to death, Tres Navarre — P.I. and Ph.D. — is the only local academic crazy enough to accept the emergency opening at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Police assure him they already have a suspect, so while they wrap up the open-and-shut case, all Tres has to do is teach three classes, grade on a curve ... and walk in a dead man's shoes.

It should be an easy assignment — but one thing Tres doesn't do is easy. When the evidence in the case starts looking a little too perfect, when the killing doesn't stop, Tres takes on some extracurricular research into the heart of an assassin — and lands in a high-stakes game of gangster honor on the darkest streets of San Antonio's West Side....



From the Back Cover
"Raise your margarita to Rick Riordan....This tale of revenge and remorse sizzles and skids like drops of water on a hot skillet."
-- Texas Monthly

"Starts off with a literal bang and then gathers speed from there."
-- Entertainment Weekly

"If not the king of Texas crime writing, Rick Riordan is certainly among the princes in a royal family that already includes James Lee Burke."
-- The Denver Post


"Riordan writes so well about the people and topography of his Texas hometown that he quickly marks the territory as his own."
-- Chicago Tribune

Don't miss the spicy Tex-Mex flavor of the first two Tres Navarre novels:

Big Red Tequila

Winner of the Shamus and Anthony Awards and

The Widower's Two-Step

Winner of the Edgar Award

Available from bantam books

And coming soon his next Tres Navarre novel




About the Author
Rick Riordan is the author of two previous Tres Navarre novels -- Big Red Tequila, winner of the Shamus and Anthony Awards, and The Widower's Two-Step, winner of the Edgar Award. A middle-school English teacher by day, Riordan lives with his wife and family in San Antonio, Texas, where he is at work on his fourth Tres Navarre novel.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Dr. David Mitchell waved me toward the dead professor's chair. "Try it out, son."

Mitchell and Detective DeLeon sat down on the students' side of the desk, the safe side. I took the professor's chair. It was padded in cushy black leather and smelled faintly of sports cologne. Walnut armrests. Great back support.

Mitchell smiled. "Comfortable?"

"I'd be more so," I told him, "if the last two people who sat here hadn't died."

Mitchell's smile thinned. He glanced at Detective DeLeon, got no help there, then looked wearily around the office -- the cluttered bookshelves, file cabinets topped with dreadlocks of dying pothos plants, the tattered Bayeux tapestry posters on the walls. "Son, Dr. Haimer's death was a heart attack."

"After receiving death threats and being driven out of the job," I recalled. "And Haimer's successor?"

Detective DeLeon sat forward. "That was a .45, Mr. Navarre."

When DeLeon moved, her blazer and skirt and silk blouse shimmered in frosty shades of gray, all sharp creases and angles. Her hair was cut in the same severe pattern, only black. Her eyes glittered. The whole effect reminded me of one of those sleek, fashionable Sub-Zero freezer units, petite size.

She tugged an incident report out of the folder in her lap, passed me a color Polaroid of Dr. Aaron Brandon -- the University of Texas at San Antonio's new medievalist for one-half of one glorious spring semester.

The photo showed a middle-aged Anglo man crumpled like a marionette in front of a fireplace. Behind him, the limestone mantel was smeared with red clawlike marks where the body had slid into sitting position against the grate. The man's hands were palms-up in his lap, supplicating. His blue eyes were open. He wore khaki pants and his bare, chunky upper body was matted with blood and curly black hair. Bored into his chest just above his nipples were two tattered holes the size of flashlight handles.

I pushed the photo back toward DeLeon. "You homicide investigators. Always so reassuring."

She smiled without warmth.

I looked at Mitchell. "You really expect me to take the job?"

Mitchell shifted in his seat, looking everywhere except at the photo of his former faculty member. He scratched one triangular white sideburn.

The poor guy had obviously gotten no sleep in the last week. His suit jacket was rumpled. His rodentlike features had lost their quickness. He looked infinitely older and more grizzled than he had just six months ago, when he'd offered me this same position for the first time.

It had been mid-October then. Dr. Theodore Haimer had just been forced into retirement after his comments about "the damn coddled Mexicans at UTSA" made the Express-News and triggered an avalanche of student protests and hate mail the likes of which the normally placid campus had never seen. Shortly afterward, while the English division was still boxing up Haimer's books and interviewing candidates for his job, the old man had been found at home, his heart frozen like a chunk of quartz, his face buried in a bowl of dry Apple Jacks.

I'd decided against teaching at the time because I'd been finishing my apprenticeship with Erainya Manos for a private investigator's license.

My mother, who'd arranged the first interview with Mitchell, had not been thrilled. A nice safe job for once, she'd pleaded. A chance to get back into academia.

Looking now at the photo of Aaron Brandon, who'd taken the nice safe job instead of me, I thought maybe the whole "Mother Knows Best" thing was overrated.

"We offered you this position last fall, Tres." Mitchell tried to keep the petulance out of his voice, the implication that I could've saved him a lot of trouble back in October, maybe gotten myself killed right off the bat. "I think you should reconsider."

I said, "A second chance."

"Absolutely."

"And you couldn't pay any reputable professor enough money now."

Mitchell's left eye twitched. "It's true we need a person with very special qualifications. The fact that you, ah, have another set of skills--"

"You can watch your ass," Detective DeLeon translated. "Maybe avoid making yourself corpse number three until we make an arrest."

I was loving this woman.

I swiveled in Aaron Brandon's chair and gazed out the window. A couple of pigeons roosted on the ledge outside the glass. Beyond, the view of the UTSA quadrangle was obscured by the upper branches of a mesquite, shining with new margarita-green foliage. Through the leaves I could see the walls of the Behavioral Sciences Building next door, the small red and blue shapes of students making their way up and down steps in the central courtyard, across wide grassy spaces and concrete walkways.

Icicle-blue sky, temperature in the low eighties. Your basic perfect Texas spring day outside your basic perfect campus office. It was a view Dr. Haimer had earned through twenty years of tenure. A view Aaron Brandon had enjoyed for less than ninety days.

I turned back to the dead man's office.

Yellow loops of leftover crime-scene tape were stuffed into the waist-high metal trash can between Brandon's desk and the window. On the corner of the desk sat a pile of ungraded essays from the undergraduate Chaucer seminar. Next to that was a silver-framed photo of the professor with a very pretty Latina woman and a child, maybe three years old. They were all standing in front of an old-fashioned merry-go-round. The little boy had Brandon's blue eyes and the woman's smile and reddish-brown hair.

Next to the photo were the death threats -- a neat stack of seven white business envelopes computer-printed in Chicago 12-point, each containing one page of well-written, grammatically correct venom. Each threat was unsigned. The first was addressed to Theodore Haimer, the following six to Aaron Brandon. One dated two weeks ago promised a pipe bomb. One dated a week before that promised a knife in Brandon's back as a symbol of how the Latino community felt about the Establishment replacing one white racist with another. The campus had been swept and no bombs had been found; no knives had been forthcoming. None of the letters said anything about shooting Brandon at home in the chest with a .45.

"You have leads?" I asked DeLeon.

She gave me the Sub-Zero smile. "You know Sergeant Schaeffer, Mr. Navarre?"

I said, "Whoops."

Gene Schaeffer had been a detective in homicide until recently, when he'd accepted a transfer promotion to vice. Sometimes Schaeffer and I were friends. More often, like whenever I needed something from him, Schaeffer wanted to kill me.

"The sergeant warned me about you," DeLeon confirmed. "Something about your father being a retired captain -- you feeling you had special privileges."

"Bexar County Sheriff," I corrected. "Dead, not retired."

"You've got no special privileges with me, Mr. Navarre. Whatever else you do, you're going to stay out of my investigation."

"And if the person or persons who killed Brandon decides I'm Anglo racist oppressor number three?"

DeLeon smiled a little more genuinely. I think the idea appealed to her. "You cover your ass until we get it straightened out. You can do that, right?"

How to say no to a job offer. Let me count the ways.

"I'd have to talk with my employer--"

"Erainya Manos," Dr. Mitchell interrupted. "We've already done that."

I stared at him.

"The provost is more than agreeable to retaining Ms. Manos' services," Mitchell said wearily, like he'd already spent too much time haggling that point. "While you're teaching for us, Ms. Manos will be finding out what she can about the hate mail, assessing potential continued threats to the faculty."

"You're wasting your money," DeLeon told him.

Mitchell continued as if she hadn't spoken. "The campus attorney's office has employed private investigation firms before. Confidence-building measure. Ms. Manos considered the contract a more-than-fair trade for sharing your time with us, son."

"I bet."

I looked at DeLeon.

She shrugged. "Say no if you want, Mr. Navarre. I've got no interest in your P.I. business. I'm simply not opposed to the campus hiring somebody who can stay alive for longer than three months."

I gave her a Gee thanks smile.

I sat back in the late Aaron Brandon's chair, understanding now why Erainya Manos had cheerily let me take the morning off. You have to cherish those open employer-employee relationships.

Mitchell was about to say something more when there was a knock on the office door.

A large young man leaned into the room, checked us all out, focused in on me, then wedged a plastic bin of mail through the doorway.

"You're the replacement," he said to me. "Thought so."

I'm of the opinion that you can categorize just about anybody by the type of vegetable their clone would've grown from in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The guy in the doorway was definitely a radish. His skin was composed of alternate white and ruddy splotches and gnarled with old acne scars. On top of his head was a small sprig of bleached hair that matched the white rooty whiskers on his chin. His upper body sagged over his belt in generous slabs of red polo-shirted flesh. His face had upwardly smeared features -- lips, nose, eyebrows. They did not beckon with intelligence.

"Gregory," Professor Mitchell sighed. "Not now."

Gregory pushed his way farther into the office. He balanced his mail bin on his belly and stared at me expectantly. "You have my essay?"

"Gregory, this isn't the time," Mitchell insisted.

Gregory grunted. "I told Brandon, I said, 'Man, some people are really late with the grading but you take the cake. You ever want your mail again you get me my essay back.' That's what I told him. You got it graded yet?"

I smiled.

Gregory didn't smile back. His eyes seemed out of focus. Maybe he wasn't talking to me at all. Maybe he was talking to the pothos plants.

"I don't have your essay," I said.

"It's the one on the werewolf," he insisted. The mail bin sagged against his side. I'd disappointed him. "The Marie de France dit."

"Bisclavret," I guessed.

"Yeah." Unfocused light twinkled in his eyes. Had I read the essay after all? Had the pothos read it?

"Bisclavret's a lai," I said. "A long narrative poem. Dits are shorter, like fables. The essay's not graded and I may not be the one grading it, Gregory."

He frowned. "It's a dit."

Professor Mitchell sighed through his nose. "Gregory, we're having a conference..."

DeLeon took off her gray blazer and folded it over the top of her chair. Her bone-colored silk blouse was sleeveless, her arms the color of French roast and smoothly muscled. Her side arm was visible now -- a tiny black Glock 23 in a leather Sam Browne holster. When Gregory saw the gun, his mouth closed fully for the first time in the conversation, maybe the first time in his life.

DeLeon said, "Dr. Navarre told you it was a lai, Gregory. Were there any other questions?"

Gregory kept his mouth closed. He shifted his mail bin around, looked at Professor Mitchell like he was expecting protection, then at me. "Maybe I could check back tomorrow?"

"Good idea," I said. "And the mail?"

Gregory thought about it, checked out DeLeon's Glock one more time, then dipped a beefy hand into the bin. He brought out a rubber-banded stack of letters that probably represented two weeks of withheld mail. He threw it on the desk and knocked over the silver-framed photo of Brandon's family.

"Fine," Gregory said. "Package, too."

The package hit the table with a muffled clunk. It was a manila bubble-wrap mailer, eleven by seventeen, dinged up and glistening at both ends with scotch tape. It had a large red stamp along the side that read INTRACAMPUS DELIVERIES ONLY.

While Professor Mitchell shooed Gregory out the door, DeLeon and I were staring at the same thing -- the plain white address label on the mailing envelope. AARON BRANDON, HSS 3.11. No street address or zip. No return. A computer-printed label, Chicago 12-point.

I remember locking eyes with DeLeon for maybe half a second. After that it happened fast.

DeLeon put a hand on Professor Mitchell's shoulder and calmly started to say, "Why don't we go--" when something inside the package made a plasticky crick-crick-crick sound like a soda bottle cap being twisted off.

DeLeon was smaller than Mitchell by maybe a hundred pounds, but she had him wrestled to the floor on the count of two. I should have followed her example.

Instead, I swept the package off the desk and into the metal trash can.

Nice plan if I'd been able to get to the floor myself. But the trash can started toppling. First toward my face. Then toward the window. Then it went off like a cannon.

In the first millisecond, even before the sound registered, the force of the blast frosted a huge ragged oval in the glass, then melted it in a cone of metal shards and yellow ribbon and flames, ripping through the wall and the mesquite outside and shredding the new leaves and branches into ticker tape.

I was on my butt in the opposite corner of the office. My ankle was twisted in the walnut armrest of Aaron Brandon's overturned chair and my ribs had slammed against a filing cabinet. There was an upside-down pothos plant in my lap. Someone was pressing a very large A-flat tuning fork to the base of my skull and my left cheek felt wet and cold. I dabbed at the cheek with my fingers, felt nothing, brought my fingers away, and saw that they glistened red.

Except for the tuning fork, the room was silent. Leaves and pigeon feathers and pages from essays were twirling aimlessly in the air, curlicuing in and out of the blasted wall. There was a fine white smoke layering the room and a smell like burning swimming-pool chemicals.

Slowly, DeLeon got to her feet. A single yellow pothos leaf was stuck in her hair. She pulled Mitchell up by the elbow.

Neither of them looked hurt. DeLeon examined the room coolly, then looked at me, focusing on the side of my face.

"You're bleeding," she announced.

It sounded like she was talking through a can and string, but I was relieved to register any sound at all. Then I heard other things -- voices in the plaza below, people yelling. A low, hot sizzle from the remnants of the blasted garbage can.

I staggered to my feet, brushed the plant and the dirt off my lap, took a step toward the window. No more pigeons on the ledge. The bottom of the garbage can, the only part that wasn't shredded, had propelled itself backward with such force that an inch of the base was embedded in the side of the oak desk.

Distressed voices were coming down the hall now. Insistent knocks on neighboring doors.

Mitchell's eyelids stuck together when he blinked. He shook his head and focused on me with great effort. "I don't -- I don't..."

DeLeon patted the old professor's shoulder, telling him she thought he was going to be okay. Then she looked at me. "A doctor for that cheek. What do you think?"

I looked out the hole somebody had just blasted in a perfect spring day. I said, "I think I'll take the job."

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
It's been said that there are only three truly indigenous American art forms: the Western, the musical comedy, and the private eye story. The first two have passed through several cycles of rising and falling popularity, but the P.I. thriller has endured -- even flourished -- with remarkable consistency. Since its inception in the 1920s, the form -- together with its defining figure, the autonomous, wise-cracking private detective -- has assumed the status of 20th-century archetype and has continued to attract a steady stream of gifted new interpreters. Recent notable examples include Robert Crais, Walter Mosley, and Dennis Lehane. We can now add to that list Texas-born novelist Rick Riordan, whose excellent third mystery, The Last King of Texas, has just hit the shelves.

Riordan has been on a fast-track since the beginning of his career. His first two novels, Big Red Tequila and The Widower's Two-Step, were both paperback originals. Between them, they won virtually every major award the field offers, including the Shamus, the Anthony, and the Edgar. The Last King of Texas marks Riordan's overdue hardcover debut. Like the first two books, this one features Tres Navarre, a San Antonio private investigator with a Ph.D. in English.

As the novel opens, Tres is considering a position that utilizes all of his professional qualifications. Aaron Brandon, a professor of English at the San Antonio branch of the University of Texas, has just been murdered. The motive behind that murder remains unknown and may have been either personal or political. Following a job interview that is violently disrupted by the arrival of a letter bomb, Tres agrees to replace Brandon and assume his interrupted courseload while San Antonio homicide detectives continue to pursue his murderer.

The initial investigation into the victim's background reveals that, six years before, his own father -- a shady Texas entrepreneur named Jeremiah Brandon -- had also been murdered, shot down in a local bar by Zeta Sanchez, his employee and personal protégé. When police learn that Sanchez, who disappeared immediately after the shooting, has recently returned to town, the new investigation suddenly develops a focus. Eyewitness testimony, along with the subsequent discovery of incriminating physical evidence, once again points to Sanchez, who is arrested following a shootout in which a San Antonio deputy sheriff is seriously wounded.

This apparent solution to the Brandon murder is swift and convenient, but not -- from Tres Navarre's viewpoint -- altogether convincing. Disturbed by a number of discrepancies that the local district attorney seems determined to ignore, Tres pursues his own independent investigation, which takes him into the often sordid history of the Brandon family. Together with a fellow private detective, a beautiful, hard-edged homicide cop, and a violent, streetwise "pawnshop king" named Ralph Arguello, Tres comes gradually to a different -- and very surprising -- conclusion. Along the way, his researches illuminate the troubled past of Ines Brandon, Aaron's widow; the related history of Zeta Sanchez and his own abbreviated marriage; the bloody rituals of the San Antonio youth gangs; and the hidden connection between the Brandon family business -- repairing amusement rides for the Southwestern carnival circuit -- and the South Texas heroin trade.

There's nothing essentially new in any of this, but that's perfectly O.K. Riordan understands the conventions of his chosen form and works comfortably within them. His protagonist, Tres Navarre, is -- despite his admittedly unusual alternate profession -- an obvious lineal descendent of Philip Marlowe: brash, tough, loyal, and driven by an intensely personal ethical code. The narrative itself is swift, violent, and vivid, filled with gracenotes and effortlessly infused with the ambiance of the American Southwest. Most importantly, Riordan has given us a novel that realistically reflects the effects of violence on ordinary people: the men, women, and children who endure -- and sometimes even survive -- their traumatic encounters with a corrupt, increasingly inhuman society.

Familiar or not, The Last King of Texas is an engrossing, high-energy performance and a welcome addition to a crowded field. Riordan, clearly, is a writer to watch, and his narrator/hero, Tres Navarre, is a character who is well worth revisiting, who honors -- and extends -- the peculiarly American tradition from which he springs. (Bill Sheehan)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Multiple-award-winning author Rick Riordan brings back smart-mouthed Texas P.I. Tres Navarre for his most dangerous case yet. If you think the academic world is deadly dull, you're half right....

The Last King Of Texas

When a controversial English professor is found shot to death, Tres Navarre—P.I. and Ph.D.—is the only local academic crazy enough to accept the emergency opening at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Police assure him they already have a suspect, so while they wrap up the open-and-shut case, all Tres has to do is teach three classes, grade on a curve...and walk in a dead man's shoes. It should be an easy assignment—but one thing Tres doesn't do is easy. When the evidence in the case starts looking a little too perfect, when the killing doesn't stop, Tres takes on some extracurricular research into the heart of an assassin—and lands in a high-stakes game of gangster honor on the
darkest streets of San Antonio's West Side....

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

In a terrific sequel to The Widower's Two-Step, which won the 1999 Edgar for Best Original Paperback, the third Tres Navarre mystery finds the academic-turned-PI reluctant to accept a chair in medieval studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio, a chair whose last two tenants have met with violent deaths. But when a bomb goes off in the dean's office nearly killing him and two others, he instantly accepts the assignment. Tres quickly finds out that the second victim's father, Jeremiah Brandon, a ruthless amusement-park ride manufacturer known as the "King of the Carnivals," was also murdered years before. The prime suspect then was Jeremiah's former employee, gang member Zeta Sanchez, who believed that the predatory Jeremiah was sleeping with his wife, but Sanchez was never apprehended. Suddenly it is reported that, after years on the run (and in a Mexican jail), he has been spotted in the region. Tagging along with the San Antonio police, Tres finds himself in the middle of a violent shoot-out during which Sanchez is arrested; now he is also the number one suspect in the murder of Jeremiah's son. Not surprisingly, Sanchez vigorously protests his innocence. All this happens in just the first 40 pages of this fast-paced and highly entertaining novel, as Tres finds himself drawn into the complex vortex of the Brandon family's ugly past. With the help of beautiful yet tough homicide detective Ana DeLeon (a potential romantic interest) and other, less than savory, friends from the wrong side of the law, the wisecracking Tres untangles an intricate web of murderous family rivalries, missing persons and heroin traffic--all the while evoking with bright color the interplay of San Antonio's Latino and Anglo cultures and the joys of Tex-Mex cuisine. (Jan.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Jackson "Tres" Navarre, San Antonio P.I. and Berkeley Ph.D., returns in this third and, so far, best installment of a promising series (following Big Red Tequila and Widower's Two-Step). Here, Tres is allowed to indulge in both of his career interests. After a controversial professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio is murdered, Tres takes his place and investigates while attempting to prove himself as a teacher. Not surprisingly, the explanation behind the murder is not as simple as it first appears. Riordan weaves a tight tale, capturing the spirit of south Texas and imbuing Tres with his own peculiar flavor--evidence that his style is maturing. This is certain to please fans of the first two Navarre novels and win new ones as well. Recommended for popular fiction collections.--Craig L. Shufelt, Lane P.L., Hamilton, OH Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

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