Ground Money, The Gabe Wager Novels

Name: Ground Money, The Gabe Wager Novels
Author: Rex Burns

An old cowboy asks Gabe for help with his estranged sons
When he was a teenager, Gabe Wager and his friends in the Denver barrio had no greater idol than Vaquero Tommy Sanchez. One of the rare Mexicans to break through into professional rodeo, Sanchez was a hero to every Hispanic boy with dreams of making it in a white man’s world. By the time Sanchez’s star faded, Wager was away with the Marine Corps, enduring terrors but supported by his memories of hot, dusty rodeo days. Now the old barrio has been bulldozed, Wager is a homicide detective, and Sanchez is little more than a memory of faded glory. The retired cowboy’s estranged sons are following in his footsteps, and he fears they may have fallen in with a bad crowd. He asks Wager to find them and keep them out of trouble. Wager agrees, even though rogue police work could cost him his badge. What man could ever refuse his boyhood hero?

Rex Burns

Rex Burns (b. 1935) is the author of numerous thrillers set in and around Denver, Colorado. Born in California, he served in the Marine Corps and attended Stanford University and the University of Minnesota before becoming a writer. His Edgar Award–winning first novel, The Alvarez Journal (1975), introduced Gabe Wager, a Denver police detective working in an organized crime unit. Burns continued this hard-boiled series through ten more novels, concluding it with 1997’s The Leaning Land. One of the Wager mysteries, The Avenging Angel (1983), was adapted as a feature film, Messenger of Death, starring Charles Bronson. Burns’s other two series center on Devlin Kirk and James Raiford, both Denver-based private detectives.

Once a monthly mystery review columnist in the Rocky Mountain News, Burns has also written nonfiction and hosted the Mystery Channel’s Anatomy of a Mystery. He lives and writes in Boulder, Colorado.