The Territory

Starred review from September 19, 2011
Drug runners have turned Artemis, Tex., across the Rio Grande from Mexico, into a war zone in Fields’s impressive debut, winner of the 2010 Tony Hillerman Prize. On both sides of the border, the police are outnumbered and whole neighborhoods fear the turf battles between the Medrano and the La Bestia cartels. Police chief Josie Gray and her small department are doing their best to keep the criminals in check, but losing ground every day. Josie is targeted after killing a La Bestia hit man and wounding another. She also learns she’s on the “enemies” list of a Second Amendment group, whose leader, Red Goff, has just been murdered. The town’s egotistical, power-hungry mayor constantly undermines her, and she finds evidence that at least one sheriff’s deputy is on the take. Fields’s rich plotting, nonstop action, and deft characterizations show the personal side of the larger issue of drug cartels on both sides of the border.

October 1, 2011
A drug war between the Medrano and La Bestia cartels holds a small border town hostage. Artemis, Texas, police chief Josie Gray is having a rough week. Caught in a shootout between two rival drug cartels, Josie finds that her job description now includes protecting one gang from the other. While she's trying to keep the peace, Josie becomes a target when she kills one gang member and imprisons another. There's more trouble in another corner of town. Red Goff, the local face of Second Amendment rights, is found shot and killed in a trailer neighboring his own. Red was the head of a local group of gun enthusiasts creatively named The Gunners. Now his stash of weapons has gone missing. With so much violence already plaguing Artemis, a big cache of missing weapons is bad news for Josie and her colleagues, Sheriff Roy Martinez and Mayor Moss. Nor is Josie's bad week limited to her investigation of Red's murder and her tightrope walk between the two drug gangs. Her mother, an adult version of a spoiled child, has come for a visit and who knows whatever else. Danger mounts as it becomes increasingly clear that the Medrano gang is going to hold Josie personally responsible for any deaths on her watch. Despite a clear, detailed plot, Fields' debut lacks the spark that would bring her sorely tried heroine and her problems alive.

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Starred review from October 1, 2011

Josie Gray, police chief for a tiny Texas border town, isn't about to let the Mexican drug cartels overrun Artemis, population 2500. But a night of brutal slayings on the Mexican side spills over into her local emergency room, and the result is a hospital shoot-out with huge ramifications for Josie's personal safety. Whew! And that's just the beginning. Then the local off-the-grid guy (who just happens to run an illegal-weapons business) is killed execution-style--turns out he'd been selling to the Mexicans. The violence increases along with Josie's strategizing as she tries to figure out whom she can trust in this mess of deception and greed. VERDICT Buckle your seatbelts for an off-road trip full of adrenaline. Tough and determined to make her way in today's Wild West, Josie is the type of police chief you'd want in your hometown, a gutsy new heroine who would be friends with Nevada Barr's Anna Pigeon and probably Lori Armstrong's Mercy Gunderson, too. This razor-fast thriller debut won the 2010 Tony Hillerman Prize for best first mystery set in the Southwest.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 15, 2011
An escalating war between two rival Mexican drug cartels spills into the West Texas border town of Artemis, where Police Chief Josie Gray has only a three-person force (herself included) to confront it. There's some help from a county sheriff she trusts, but the mayor has an active dislike of women in positions of authority and is far from having her back. When the leader of the Gunners, a Second Amendment group, is found murdered, with his arsenal of guns missing, Josie believes there is a cartel connection. But mostly she's trying to protect her town and herselfafter getting a frightening death threat, up close and personaland wondering whether she has a future with the man she loves, accountant Dillon Reese. In this debut novel, which has already won the 2010 Tony Hillerman Prize, Fields builds suspense with a well-wrought cast of characters who deal with deadly violence that's particularly frightening for being all-too-believable. And no one does it better than Josie Gray, who persists in the face of unspeakable danger. Readers will want to see much more of her.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)