MAYHEM WITH A BADGE After wandering the peephole wilderness of a private detective for two decades, defrocked Dallas homicide detective Ed Earl Burch is an official manhunter again, wearing the badge of a DA's investigator in the harsh desert mountains of West Texas. Big D, it ain't. And life as a resurrected lawman isn't everything he hoped it would be. Too many rules. Not enough satisfaction. And a boss who hates him for saving his life. But Burch is back, tracking a serial killer who tortured and murdered his ex-lover--an Aryan Brotherhood gang leader Burch thought he killed in a desert shootout. He's also trying to protect the fugitive granddaughter of an old friend and her four-year-old son--from this straight-razor butcher and gunsels hired by her incestuous Dixie Mafia daddy. Throats get slashed. Bullets smack flesh. Bodies drop. And Ed Earl Burch and his partner, Bobby Quintero, are in reckless pursuit, dodging death, closing in on their prey. No place Burch would rather be. Unless he gets killed. "In The Fatal Saving Grace , Jim Nesbitt delivers a scorched-earth tale set under the vast dome of West Texas sky, where every shadow conceals an ambush and every road bleeds history. Dark, relentless and steeped in the sweat and dust of border country, Nesbitt writes with the authenticity of a man who has walked these roads, smelled that dry wind, and lived to tell the tale. The writing is hard-bitten but lyrical, equal parts gunpowder and poetry, capturing a land where men live by codes written in blood. Ed Earl Burch is one of the great contemporary hard-boiled protagonists—scarred, unyielding, and bound to his own brutal sense of right and wrong. Nesbitt paints Texas in colors of rust, smoke, and whiskey, and the result is a story that feels carved in stone. This is cowboy noir at its finest." — Baron Birtcher, Will Rogers Medallion winning author of Knife River "Ed Earl Burch is back, and that's great news for readers who love classic hard-boiled noir, colorful characters, crackling dialogue and plenty of action. You get all that - and a whole lot more - in The Fatal Saving Grace (great title!), the fifth book in Jim Nesbitt's award-winning series about a battered, boozing but tough-as-nails lawman who is willing to break the law himself to get the job done. Ed Earl almost gets killed at the beginning here - and then the bodies pile up quickly as he goes on a harrowing, bloody journey to seek revenge and to see justice done. Despite all the violence, some of the scenes are laugh out loud funny too - like when Ed Earl casually asks his cop partner "excessive?" after brutally beating a bad guy to a pulp. All the pages of this winning action thriller just fly by with snappy, smart stuff from Nesbitt who clearly loves to write the Ed Earl Burch character as much as we love to read about him. So go grab yourself some Ed Earl Burch - this one, plus the earlier books, if you haven't read them yet. Highly recommended!" — R.G. Belsky , author of the Clare Carlson series "Jim Nesbitt knows his Texas crime and writes one fine line at a time. Hard-boiled with prickly pears, old leather boots, a bit of tobacco, freshly spit of course, he gets it right." — Joe R. Lansdale , champion mojo storyteller and author of the Hap 'N Leonard crime thrillers "A gritty and deadly must-read, THE FATAL SAVING GRACE cements Nesbitt's standing among the best writers in the pantheon of Southern noir." — Bruce Robert Coffin, bestselling author of the Detective Justice Mysteries "My old newspaper colleague, friend, and pick-up basketball nemesis Jim Nesbitt -- we were kind of like Br'er Rabbit vs. Br'er Bear -- writes hard-boiled crime fiction these days. And I do mean hard. Jim's beat-up, badass Dallas PI, an ex-cop named Ed Earl Burch who's partial to Duke Wayne and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Lucky Strikes and Maker's Mark, makes Mike Hammer look like Miss Marple. Definitely not for the faint of heart, Jim's novels nonetheless offer wicked humor and a keen eye for the details of Texas terrain as well as brass-knuck action and language that would strip the paint off a Hummer." — Noel Holston, author of Life After Deaf and As I Die Laughing Ed Earl Burch, wearing a badge again after two decades wandering in the peephole wilderness of the private detective, knows exactly how it feels to be punished for a selfless act.   A decade ago, in a ragged mountain pueblito two hours south of the Rio Grande, he blew away a killer who was about to pump hollow points into the skull of his partner. The man Burch saved is now his boss, Cuervo County Sheriff Sudden Doggett.   They shook hands and Doggett thanked him as they stood over the killer's corpse. Never mentioned it again. Now, seeing Burch seems to terminally piss off the high sheriff.   Sharp banter between two tough lawdogs holding the line in the harsh desert mountains of West Texas has turned cutting and strictly one-way. Aimed at tearing through