ALL THE BONES IN BROOKS COUNTY, TEXAS

A deputy and a forensic anthropologist join forces to investigate bones found on a Texas ranch in Barker’s crime thriller.

A Texas rancher calls local police after his dog brings him a human bone. He directs Deputy Hondo Velazquez, just a year on the job, to a spot where a “death spiral” of vultures has been circling. Hondo uncovers a number of bones, as well as a crudely made toy bunny. The sheriff and his team arrive to gather up the remains—likely the bones of migrants who died crossing the border—for mass burial, a routine task in the area. Hondo, however, can’t shake that something is wrong; he feels an affinity for the migrants, as his mother was one and he still has family back in Mexico. He sneaks some of the bones to Baylor University forensic anthropologist Magnolia Moss, who runs a program to identify migrant skeletal remains collected from border town cemeteries. After Magnolia finds a bullet in a skull that she examines, Hondo invites her along on an investigation that includes encounters with a menacing female cartel enforcer in Mexico and brutish border patrol cops. Finally, discoveries back at the ranch (and in a nearby silo) reveal horrible truths and provide a closure of sorts for Hondo. The author, a screenwriter, brings rich cinematic dimensions to his fiction debut, making the most of the bleak Texas landscape (cue the vultures) and crafting a Bogart-like existential hero for our times: “The border brought out the worst in people. In the way he’d learned the Wild West had. Which was, in his mind, the very origins of the conflict he found himself immersed within.” This character’s eloquent thoughts, and Barker’s development of his key characters’ various demons and backstories, serve to enhance the suspenseful narrative, which culminates in a masterful final cross-cutting sequence and shootout.

A gripping, multilayered crime novel depicting the drama and trauma along the U.S./Mexican border.