The End of Nowhere

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Speaking Volumes - Fiction

2023 FINALIST, PEACEMAKER AWARD OF WESTERN FICTIONEERS

2023 FINALIST, WILL ROGERS MEDALLION AWARD

It's 1917, and the Mexican Revolution has the Big Bend of Texas aflame. But the firestorm is no greater than the one inside newspaper reporter Jack Landon. Disillusioned, he flees down the road to nowhere and finds himself in Esperanza. Populated by people of Mexican heritage, the small village on the Texas bank of the Rio Grande is a target of Texas Rangers Company B, which unjustly considers it a bandit den.

Jack befriends a teenaged boy and his adult sister, Mary, who teaches in the Esperanza school. As Jack assimilates to life in Esperanza, the threat of Rangers looms large. Eventually a day of reckoning descends, and it envelops Jack and Mary and the entire village.

This novel is based on what actually happened at Porvenir, Texas, on January 28, 1918—the darkest moment in Texas Rangers history.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Chapter Three
Chapter Five
Chapter
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter TwentyTwo
Chapter TwentyThree
Chapter TwentyFour

Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter TwentyFive
Epilogue
Copyright

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About the author

The author of twenty-seven books, Patrick Dearen is a former award-winning reporter for two West Texas daily newspapers. As a nonfiction writer, Dearen has produced books such as A Cowboy of the Pecos; Saddling Up Anyway: The Dangerous Lives of Old-Time Cowboys; and Castle Gap and the Pecos Frontier, Revisited. His research has led to sixteen novels, including The Big Drift, winner of the Spur Award of Western Writers of America and the Peacemaker Award of Western Fictioneers. His other western-themed novels include When Cowboys Die (a Spur Award finalist); The End of Nowhere; The Illegal Man; To Hell or the Pecos; and Perseverance. His novels Apache Lament and Dead Man’s Boot both received the Elmer Kelton Award from the Academy of Western Artists.

A ragtime pianist and wilderness enthusiast, Dearen lives with his wife in Texas.

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