The House of Wolfe

Starred review from January 5, 2015
In Blake’s masterly third Border Noir (after 2013’s The Rules of Wolfe), a female member of the American branch of the Wolfe family (a large clan of outlaws who operate numerous legitimate businesses and deal in illegal arms on both sides of the U.S./Mexican border) finds herself in big trouble. In Mexico City, kidnappers led by El Galán, an up-and-coming gangster intent on making a name for himself, abduct college-age Jessie Juliet Wolfe, along with an entire 10-person wedding party, and demand payment of a $5 million ransom within 24 hours. With aid from Los Jaguaros, as the Mexican Blake family’s criminal network is known, Rudy Max Wolfe, a cousin of Jessie’s, and Charlie Fortune, another cousin, hope to slip into Mexico undetected and rescue Jessie, but of course everything goes to hell quickly. Blake convincingly portrays modern-day Mexico City as a beautiful and surreal landscape, and he lets the wealthy elite and the desperately poor share the stage, often with violent and tragic results. As always, the writing is both poetic and visceral, and the mostly present-tense narrative keeps the reader engaged as the action rushes toward a surprising and fully satisfying conclusion. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Associates.

April 27, 2015
An ambitious criminal named Galan has organized the meticulous kidnapping of a wedding party from a Mexico City mansion, seeking a $5 million ransom within 24 hours, in the latest addition to Blake’s Wolfe Family saga. Jessie Wolfe is one of the bridesmaids, and her family members don’t trust Galan to free his captives unharmed. Rarely does a thriller maintain such a relentlessly suspenseful atmosphere, and it’s a mark of reader DeSantos’s talent that he sets a pace that keeps up the tension without exhausting either the listener or himself. As the novel shifts from an impersonal observation of the crime and its aftermath to the very personal narration of Rudy Wolfe, the family’s main fixer, DeSantos dutifully switches from hard-edged rendition to a hard-boiled focus on finding the kidnappers and rescuing Jessie. Retribution will come, Rudy tells us. But maybe not. In any case, DeSantos gives voice to an assortment of characters—male and female, Mexican and American—whom he effectively and effortlessly switches between as they become engaged in a chillingly exciting, violent confrontation between Wolfes and Galan’s warriors. A Grove/Atlantic/Mysterious hardcover.

October 15, 2014

Last seen in Rules of Wolfe, which was best-booked by a handful of publications, the Wolfe family runs guns across the Tex-Mex border. Here, a go-getting gangster in Mexico City kidnaps a ten-member wedding party, which includes bridesmaid Jessica Juliet Wolfe.

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