Triple Crossing

Starred review from June 6, 2011
Journalist Rotella (Twilight on the Line) explores the hot-button issue of immigration with its political, social, and emotional ramifications in his superb fiction debut. Rookie San Diego Border Patrol agent Valentine Pescatore on occasion slips money to the illegal immigrants he arrests, but he can't help being tainted by the violence and cruelty of his supervisor, Arleigh Garrison, whose favorite "game" is crowding as many prisoners as he can into an SUV. When Valentine chases a notorious smuggler into Tijuana, a transgression that can get him arrested, Valentine winds up recruited by attractive Isabel Puente, a U.S. federal agent who wants him to infiltrate a powerful Mexican mafia familyâand with whom he soon falls in love. Valentine's undercover role takes him to the "triple border" of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, a lawless area that breeds smugglers and terrorists. Unflinching views of a double agent's harrowing life, a violence-drenched Mexican jail, and the wild border areas complement the provocative plot.

August 1, 2011

In his fiction debut, Rotella (Twilight on the Line: Underworlds and Politics at the Mexican Border, 1998) draws a crime novel from the chaotic cauldron of the U.S.-Mexican border.

Valentine Pescatore, "boiling with youth and nerves and aggression," left a Chicago hotel security job under a cloud. His uncle, a Chicago police lieutenant, called in a favor, and Valentine entered the Border Patrol Academy. The story begins with Valentine assigned as a probationary agent on "The Line," the U.S.-Mexican border at San Diego. But he's also in trouble, caught up in the capers of his supervising officer, Garrison, a former Special Forces soldier. Garrison's shenanigans catch the attention of Isabel Puente, an Inspector General investigator. She turns Pescatore into an undercover agent. Garrison gets wind of his impending arrest and forces Pescatore to flee with him to Tijuana. Garrison is killed during the crossing, and Pescatore, because of his association with the rogue agent, is adopted into the Mexican narco-guerrilla family controlling the border city. Rotella, a former international correspondent and Pulitzer finalist, knows the territory. His characterizations of the players, bad and good, are solid. There's Junior Ruiz Caballero, the local boss for his corrupt uncle, a prominent Mexico City politician; Buffalo, a stateside gangbanger, an incoherent blend of loyalty and barbarity, self-discipline and mercilessness; good guys like Leobardo Méndez, a former political activist and reporter, head of the Diogenes Group, a task force appointed by the Mexican national government to root out corruption in the federal, state and local police. Pescatore deals with the Mexican mafioso, and Méndez and Puente deal with back-stabbing and corrupt political interests as the action shifts from San Diego to Tijuana and then to the "Triple Border," where Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil come together, a Wild West–like milieu replete with Arab terrorists, assorted drug runners, Asian immigrant smugglers and other bad actors. 

A fast-paced thriller that rings true to the real story behind the political posturing over the drug war, illegal immigration and border security.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

March 15, 2011

Valentine Pescatore, a rookie cop working the border in San Diego, is recruited by gorgeous U.S. agent Isabel Puente to infiltrate a Mexican crime family. It gets complicated when Valentine falls in love with Isabel while crossing swords with the head of Tijuana's anti-corruption unit. Since Rotella has spent the last 23 years covering terrorism, organized crime, and homeland security for the Los Angeles Times, the details in his first novel should be vivid and accurate.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2011
Reporter Rotella takes up crime fiction with energy and righteous indignation, plunging readers into the surreal three-ring circus along the border between Tijuana and San Diego. Valentine Pescatore, a young and skeptical Chicago-born Mexican Italian border-patrol agent saddled with a corrupt and crazy supervisor, finds himself triple crossing foes and allies alike as he gets entangled in crimes and investigations involving Junior, the unstable scion of a terrifying Mexican crime family; Leobardo M'ndez, a former journalist and human-rights commissioner now running a gutsy anticorruption law-enforcement group; and Isabel Puente, a determined and glamorous American federal agent. Valentines devilishly precarious undercover work takes him to the triple border where Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina converge in the United Nations of crime. As Valentine plays chameleon to survive, Rotella reveals the gnarly circuitry of international collusion in greed and tyranny, the alternating currents of cooperation and betrayal, and the courageous men and women of conscience who risk all for truth and love. A strongly choreographed, authentically detailed, and sharply funny tale of cultural complexity and raging global criminality.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)