The Long Count: A John Q Mystery

The detail is unerring … and this magisterial grasp of time and place lends the story vivid veracity. The characters leap off the page and the plotting is faultless. – John Boorman, Director of Point Blank and Deliverance Gulvin’s narrative has a distinctly cinematic feel, and his setting–the windswept plains and desolate highways of Texas–lends an eeriness that lingers throughout. The final twist is a doozy, and the devil is in the story’s cleverly seeded details. – Publisher’s Weekly With a gun on each hip and godson to the Ranger that took down Bonnie and Clyde, 36-year-old John Quarrie is Old School West with old west values, the very embodiment of the One Riot - One Ranger epithet. It’s 1967, and, with students across the state protesting the Vietnam War, the Texas Rangers are stretched pretty thin. A single father, Quarrie lives on a ranch in the Texas panhandle. Grabbling for catfish at the site of a train wreck on Memorial Day, he and his son come across the skull of a young boy. At first, the discovery seems to have no bearing on the suicide of a fellow war vet that John Q is called on to investigate. But what starts out as a single line of inquiry becomes a desperate race to find a killer who has a secret as dark and tragic as any cop is ever going to uncover.