THE WAYS 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.

James Carlos Blake is the author of thirteen novels, including The House of Wolfe, The Rules of Wolfe, which was shortlisted for the CWA Goldsboro Gold Dagger Award and named one of Booklist's Best 101 Crime Novels of the Past Decade, and Country of the Bad Wolfes. He is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and a recipient of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for In the Rogue Blood.