The Texas Job - Reavis Z. Wortham

I’m still not entirely sure whether to call Reavis Wortham’s The Texas Job a standalone novel or a prequel to his Red River series because, really, I can see it qualifying as either. The novel’s main character is Texas Ranger Tom Bell who, as an old man, plays a prominent role in The Right Side of Wrong, the third book in the Red River series. That book is set in the mid-sixties when Bell proves that he still has a lot of fight in him despite his retirement from the Rangers. The Texas Job, on the other hand, brings Bell up into East Texas from down on the southern border in 1931 and gives readers the chance to see what he was capable of in his prime. 

Tom Bell is only in Pine Top at all because he believes that the murderer from down in south Texas he’s been tracking may be hiding there. But even before he makes it all the way to the newly created shanty town, Bell - with considerable help from a young boy he meets on the trail — stumbles upon the remains of a woman whose dead body had apparently been hidden there days earlier. As a harbinger of things to come, Bell soon finds himself in a shootout even before he can make his way to local law enforcement officers to report what he’s found.

Pine Top, you see, is more boomtown than it is shanty town. Oil has recently been discovered in East Texas and the area is overrun by hundreds and hundreds of men and women looking to make a quick buck out of the discovery. That not all of them are concerned about making that money legally, is an understatement. The people who should be becoming rich, the ones who own the land on top of the oil, are in more danger than they realize. They are sitting on top of the kind of fortune people can only dream about, and some in town are willing to kill to get their hands on it. Tom Bell has no idea what he’s just ridden into, but he’s about to find out.

Bottom Line: It is always easy to get caught up in the historical period during which Reavis Wortham sets his crime novels, but this one is especially fun for readers curious about what a Depression Era oil boomtown must have been like in the day. Unsurprisingly, it was much the same as the gold mining boomtowns most of us are probably more familiar with, and Wortham captures all the inevitable chaos, greed, recklessness, and lawlessness common to this kind of race to get rich before others beat you to it. The Texas Job is a version of the classic tale in which a lone lawman rides into a corrupt town and, with the help of a few good townspeople, does everything he can to clean up the mess he finds there. It may be a classic formula, but Wortham is a good storyteller, and he handles it well.

Reavis Z. Wortham

Review Copy provided by Poisoned Pen Press

Expected Date of Publication: February 15, 2022