Book 2

The Rules of Wolfe

by James Carlos Blake

Published 25 June 2013
A Men's Journal, Deadly Pleasures, and Latinidad Best Book of the Year

Eddie Gato Wolfe is a young, impetuous member of the Wolfe family of Texas gun-runners that goes back generations. Increasingly unfulfilled by his minor role in family operations and eager to set out on his own, Eddie crosses the border to work security for a major Mexican drug cartel led by the ruthless La Navaja.

Eddie falls for a mysterious woman named Miranda, whom he learns too late is the property of an intimate member of La Navaja's organization. When they're discovered, the violent upshot forces Eddie and Miranda to run for their lives, fleeing into the deadly Sonora Desert in hope of crossing the border to safety. But La Navaja's reach is far and his lust for revenge insatiable. If La Navaja's men don't kill Eddie and Miranda, the brutal desert just may. Their only hope: help from the family that Eddie abandoned.

At once a riveting thriller and an inside look at the blood-drenched Mexican drug trade, The Rules of Wolfe is another classic crime novel from a writer Entertainment Weekly calls, "one of the greatest chroniclers of the mythical American outlaw life."


Book 3

House of Wolfe

by James Carlos Blake

Published 1 January 2015
On a rainy winter night in Mexico City, a ten-member wedding party is kidnapped in front of the groom's family mansion. The perpetrator is a small-time gangster named El Galan, who wants nothing more than to make his crew part of a major cartel and hopes that this crime will be his big break. He sets the wedding party's ransom at five million US dollars, to be paid in cash within 24 hours.

The only captive not related to either the bride or the groom is the young Jessica Juliet Wolfe, a bridesmaid and close friend of the bride. Jessie hails from a family of notorious outlaws that has branches on both sides of the border, and when the Wolfes learn of Jessie's abduction, they fear that the kidnappers will kill the captives after receiving the ransom--unless they rescue Jessie first.

Gritty and exhilarating, The House of Wolfe takes readers on a wild ride from Mexico City's opulent neighborhoods to its frenetic downtown streets and feral shantytowns, as El Galan proves how dangerous it is to underestimate an ambitious criminal, and Jessie's blood kin desperately try to find her before it's too late.


Book 4

The Ways of Wolfe

by James Carlos Blake

Published 5 September 2017
"James Carlos Blake has long been one of my favorites, but his Wolfe family saga may be his best work to date."--Ace Atkins, on The House of Wolfe

Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner James Carlos Blake delves back into the dark realms of the Wolfe family, a clan whose roots run deep on both sides of the United States-Mexico border, and whose prevailing interests straddle both sides of the law.

Twenty years ago, college student Axel Prince Wolfe--heir apparent to his Texas family's esteemed law firm and its "shade trade" criminal enterprises--teamed up with his best friend, Billy, and a Mexican stranger in a high-end robbery that went wrong. Abandoned by his partners, he was captured and imprisoned, his family disgraced, his wife absconded, his infant daughter Jessie left an orphan. Two decades later, with eleven years still to serve, Axel has long since exhausted his desire for revenge against the partners who deserted him. All he wants now is to see the woman his daughter has become, despite her lifelong refusal to acknowledge him. When the chance comes to escape in the company of Cacho, a young Mexican inmate with ties to a major cartel, Axel takes it, and a massive manhunt ensues, taking the pair down the Rio Grande and into a desert inferno. With his chance to see Jessie now within reach, a startling discovery re-ignites an old passion and sends Axel headlong toward reckonings many years in the making.

Racing across desolate landscapes from West Texas to the Gulf of Mexico, The Ways of Wolfe is the taut story of one man's love for a daughter he has never met and his fateful struggle with his own reckless spirit.