Tres (pronounced “trace”) Navarre is an unlicensed private eye, a tequila drinker, tai chi master and outcast from Academia with a PhD in medieval studies and more than a few degrees from the street. After ten years in San Francisco, Tres comes home to San Antonio, hoping to put to rest old memories of the murder of his father, formerly the Sheriff of Bexar County. But the more Tres asks questions about that long-ago crime, the more he stirs up a hornet’s nest of politicians, mobsters, and crooked businessmen, all with secrets to hide and reasons to hate the Navarre family. The chances of survival looked better for the defenders of the Alamo.

An old friend recruits Tres Navarre to protect the career of a rising country music singer. With a million dollar record deal on the table, Miranda Daniels has everything to gain and everything to lose. Then her half-finished demo is stolen, her producer is shot at, and finally the agent who engineered her success disappears. While Tres struggles with his own career choices, he must extricate Miranda Daniels from a tangle of music industry power games and professional grudges. Tres soon finds himself on the wrong side of the local law, the Feds, and an unlikely coalition of European businessmen and local redneck barons who have enough at stake in the Texas music scene to warrant murder several times over.

When a controversial English professor is found shot to death, Tres Navarre, P.I. and Ph.D., is the only local academic crazy enough to accept the emergency opening at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Police assure him they already have a suspect, so while they wrap up the open-and-shut case, all Tres has to do is teach three classes, grade on a curve… and walk in a dead man’s shoes.

It should be an easy assignment, but one thing Tres doesn’t do is easy. When the evidence in the case starts looking a little too perfect, when the killing doesn’t stop, Tres takes on some extracurricular research into the heart of an assassin and lands in a high-stakes game of gangster honor on the darkest streets of San Antonio’s West Side…

Tres Navarre, private eye and sometimes English professor, is hoping for a laid back working vacation when he accepts a summer teaching gig at the University of Texas at Austin, even if it means shacking up for six weeks with his big brother Garrett, who calls Austin home.

Garrett Navarre — computer programmer extraordinaire, Jimmy Buffett fanatic, and all-around eccentric — is hoping to retire a multi-millionaire by the end of summer, thanks to a high tech start-up company he and two buddies have launched. Garrett has bet everything from his career to the Navarre family ranch that the company will stay alive long enough to make a public stock offering, allowing him to ride the Austin high tech boom right into the saddle of luxury.

Tres and Garrett’s hopes are both shattered with a single gunshot. Garrett’s oldest friend and business partner turns up murdered at his lakefront home, and Garrett is the only suspect.

As Tres delves into Garrett’s bizarre world to find the truth behind the murder, he comes face to face with the damaged relationships, violent lives, and billion-dollar schemes of a brave new high tech world.

Among the players: Matthew Peña, a corporate take-over artist with a trail of broken enemies in his wake and an overzealous desire to make Garrett’s company his own; Ruby McBride, the victim’s wife, a hard-edged beauty haunted by three generations of family failure; and W.B. Doebler, the head of an oil-rich clan with more power than morals, and enough skeletons in the closet to man a ghost ship. Connecting them all – the beautiful waters of Lake Travis, and an unspeakable evil that lies beneath their depths.

For Tres (pronounced “trace”) Navarre, English professor turned private investigator, business has lately taken a drastic turn south. But if chasing down bail jumpers, adulterous spouses, and workmen’s comp cases seemed like the dregs of the PI game, it was at least a living. Not as much could be said for tracking down a man like Will “the Ghost” Stirman.

The stone-cold killer has just staged a bloody escape from the Floresville State Penitentiary with a gang of violent cons. And no one seems more worried than Navarre’s boss and mentor, Erainya Manos. It was her husband along with rival PI Sam Barrera who built the case that sent Stirman away. But Erainya’s husband is dead and she’s certain Stirman won’t let that stand in the way of his taking revenge against her and her adopted son.

All of Navarre’s instincts are screaming that there’s more to this case than meets the eye. But Erainya won’t tell him—and Sam Barrera seems to be escaping into a strange twilight from a truth too terrible to remember. That leaves Tres to dig into a twisted mystery of greed, vigilantism, and murder, where lives are bought and sold and the line between guilt and innocence is razor-thin. Meanwhile, Stirman and his gang are coming, leaving behind them a trail of brutal, unforgiving violence that will end in an area of San Antonio known as Southtown—but that may soon just as well be called hell on earth.

San Antonio private investigator Tres Navarre is used to working on the edge—a razor-sharp line between legal and life sentence. But this time he’s stepped straight into no-man’s land. When an old friend appears at his door, spattered with blood and wanted for attempted homicide, Tres doesn’t have to think twice about where his loyalty lies—or the consequences.

Ralph Arguello is a criminal who put the street life behind him when he married SAPD detective Ana DeLeon. Now Ana’s been gunned down and her fellow cops don’t need to look far to find a prime suspect. For Ana recently re-opened the most infamous cold case in SAPD history — the unsolved murder of a mobster’s son on notorious Mission Road eighteen years before, which threw the San Antonio underworld into bloody chaos. And Ana was about to bring charges against the suspected killer: her husband, Ralph Arguello.

Tres is sure that Ralph didn’t do it—and that he didn’t shoot his wife. But with the police and the mafia both out for revenge, there’s no one to turn to for help. Now, armed and dangerous, the targets of a city-wide manhunt, Tres and Ralph have just hours to find out what really happened on Mission Road almost two decades ago. They set a collision course with the past, and a secret which will tears their lives apart.

Tres Navarre had given up private investigation—and with it a violent past that had buried too many friends. Newly married, with a baby on the way, it was time to find a safer line of work. He and Maia had come to Rebel Island to celebrate their honeymoon and a new future. But no sooner had they arrived than a reminder of the past showed up in the form of a corpse shot dead in room 12.

Just like that Tres finds himself flashing back on the memory of a grim childhood summer spent on the island—a summer that changed everything in his life. A summer he could never forget but never entirely remember either. And when a second corpse turns up, it’s clear to Tres that the past is not dead and buried after all, but is stalking Rebel Island with unfinished business of its own.

What really happened that long-ago summer, what dark secrets were kept, and who has come back to avenge them…these are the questions Tres, his brother Garrett, and the very pregnant Maia must answer—and time is running out. For a monster hurricane is about to hit Rebel Island, cutting them off from the mainland and leaving them trapped on a flooding island with the hotel’s remaining guests brutally dying one by one. Tres knows better than anyone that the bloodlines of South Texas are as twisted as barbed wire. This time they’re guarding a revelation that can turn his dreams of happily ever after into the ultimate nightmare.