Chock full of real criminals, rough justice, and ribald romance from New England to Mexico, James Carlos Blake's Country of the Bad Wolfes has all the titillation of a telenovela and then some. Blake tracks the adventures of the Wolfe family--whose lives are based in part on those of his own ancestors--over three generations, beginning with twin brothers Samuel Thomas and John Roger. They differ deeply beneath the skin, but they share an unbreakable sense of fraternity and the secret knowledge of a pirate father’s fate. Both are destined for the tumultuous world of war-torn Mexico but will travel vastly different paths to get there.
Spanning from the Mexican-American War to the Revolution of 1910, Country of the Bad Wolfes covers a lot history in relatively few pages, peopled by a complex web of family members--so many it's hard to keep track--and, with few exceptions, they never last long enough for the reader to develop any attachment. The Wolfe kin drop like flies, if not by bloodshed, then by disease, or in childbirth. The survivors lead lives imbued with the magical realism of García Márquez and meet deaths marked by the frontier brutality of Cormac McCarthy. With generous dollops of good old-fashioned melodrama and juicy tidbits of Mexican political history, Blake's story will entertain fans of historical and adventure novels alike. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher