Texas Novels

A huge, riveting, deeply imagined novel about the siege and fall of the Alamo in 1836. The Gates of the Alamo follows the lives of three people whose fates become bound to the now-fabled Texas fort: Edmund McGowan, a proud and gifted naturalist whose life's work is threatened by the war against Mexico; the resourceful, widowed innkeeper Mary Mott; and her sixteen-year-old son, Terrell, whose first shattering experience with love leads him instead to war, and into the crucible of the Alamo.

The story unfolds with vivid immediacy and describes the pivotal battle from the perspective of the Mexican attackers as well as the American defenders.

The final 13 hours at the Alamo began around 5 o'clock on the afternoon of March 5, 1836. Colonel William Barrett Travis drew a line in the dirt and asked all those who would stay and fight to cross it. Destinies played out that night for four people. Susannah Dickinson, a woman of surprising gumption. Young James Taylor who came to the Alamo to free Texas from the tyrannical rule of General Santa Anna. "Moses" Rose who refused to cross Travis's line because he "wasn't prepared to die."

Colonel Juan Morales, ordered to assault Crockett and his men at the south palisade, believed attacking the fort was foolhardy. But his real disgust was for Santa Anna, a man who allowed whims to dictate his decisions.

San Antonio District Attorney Chris Sinclair overcame the belief that Malachi Reese is a saintly community leader to convict Reese of murder and sentence him to Death Row. Now a series of seemingly unrelated crimes has Sinclair feeling the power of Reese from Death Row. . .

Two familias in Texas, both alike in dignity, rivalries, and passion... Having grown up in the nurturing household of Casa Capuleta, Mariana will do anything for familia. To solve her adoptive parents' financial problems amid their rapidly changing San Antonio comunidad, Mariana and her younger sisters are determined to win the Battle of the Mariachi Bands. That means competing against Hugo Montero, their father's archnemesis, and his band and escalating a decades-old feud. It also raises the stakes of Mariana's forbidden attraction for a certain dark-eyed mariachi who sets her heart racing. To Angelo Montero's familia, Mariana is also strictly off-limits. But that doesn't stop him from pursuing her. As their secret affair intensifies and the competition grows fierce, they're swept up in a brewing storm of betrayals, rivalries, and broken ties. Against the odds, they vow to bring peace. But sacrifices must be made and consequences weighed for two star-crossed lovers to make beautiful music together.

Doc Ebersole lives with the ghost of Hank Williams--not just in the figurative sense, not just because he was one of the last people to see him alive, and not just because he is rumored to have given Hank the final morphine dose that killed him.

In 1963, ten years after Hank's death, Doc himself is wracked by addiction. Having lost his license to practice medicine, his morphine habit isn't as easy to support as it used to be. So he lives in a rented room in the red-light district on the south side of San Antonio, performing abortions and patching up the odd knife or gunshot wound. But when Graciela, a young Mexican immigrant, appears in the neighborhood in search of Doc's services, miraculous things begin to happen. Graciela sustains a wound on her wrist that never heals, yet she heals others with the touch of her hand. Everyone she meets is transformed for the better, except, maybe, for Hank's angry ghost--who isn't at all pleased to see Doc doing well.

"It happened on the plaza that never slept--my favorite place in the whole of the city," writes Lupe Pérez, to begin her memoir. A mix of historical fact, vintage photos and maps, recipes, music, folklore, and south Texan culture, Lupe's story offers an eyewitness account of life on Military Plaza in San Antonio during the 1880s. Facing the impending failure of her family's chili stand, Lupe is certain she can improve profits. But her older sister and hostess, Josefa, resists Lupe's arguments--until Tom O'Malley, an itinerant vaudeville actor, arrives. By default, Lupe becomes Chili Queen, but each new venture presents new challenges for the struggling chili stand. Peter Meyer comes to town from the Hill Country to pursue his dream of becoming a shopkeeper. Despite their cultural differences, he and Lupe are drawn to one another by more than romantic feelings. They share a common entrepreneurial dream, and Peter helps Lupe grow in her business savvy. Just as business improves, word spreads of a new city hall on the plaza and the subsequent eviction of all chili stands. Where will they go? What will they do? The choice is Lupe's to make. And her response is bold.

Lucas Smothers, nineteen and from the wrong end of town, has been arrested for the rape and murder of a local girl. His lawyer, former Texas Ranger Billy Bob Holland, is convinced of Lucas's innocence--but proving it means unearthing the truth from the seething mass of deceit and corruption that spreads like wildfire in a gossipy small town where everybody knows everybody else's business.

Mere years after outlaw gangs and Comanche Indians roamed the hills where cattle barons and university professors now live and with the animosities of the Ciil War still lingered is what may be the first documented serial killer in North America. Month after month young Black women who worked in the households of Austin, Texas' most prominent citizens are found murdered. Then on a bloody Christmas Eve two women -- neither of them Black and neither servants -- were horribly murdered. The trial that eventually resulted uncovered one explosive scandal after another and tear the city of Austin apart.

National Book Award Finalist--Fiction. It is 1870 and Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the captain enjoys his rootless, solitary existence. In Wichita Falls, he is offered a $50 gold piece to deliver a young orphan to her relatives in San Antonio. Four years earlier, a band of Kiowa raiders killed Johanna's parents and sister; sparing the little girl, they raised her as one of their own. Recently rescued by the U.S. army, the ten-year-old has once again been torn away from the only home she knows. Their 400-mile journey south through unsettled territory and unforgiving terrain proves difficult and at times dangerous. Johanna has forgotten the English language, tries to escape at every opportunity, throws away her shoes, and refuses to act "civilized." Yet as the miles pass, the two lonely survivors tentatively begin to trust each other, forging a bond that marks the difference between life and death in this treacherous land. Arriving in San Antonio, the reunion is neither happy nor welcome. The captain must hand Johanna over to an aunt and uncle she does not remember--strangers who regard her as an unwanted burden. A respectable man, Captain Kidd is faced with a terrible choice: abandon the girl to her fate or become--in the eyes of the law--a kidnapper himself. Exquisitely rendered and morally complex, News of the World is a brilliant work of historical fiction that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust.

Mercy is hard in a place like this . . . It's February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, stands on the cusp of the next great oil boom. While the town's men embrace the coming prosperity, its women intimately know and fear the violence that always seems to follow. In the early hours of the morning after Valentine's Day, fourteen-year-old Gloria Ramírez appears on the front porch of Mary Rose Whitehead's ranch house, broken and barely alive. The teenager had been viciously attacked in a nearby oil field--an act of brutality that is tried in the churches and barrooms of Odessa before it can reach a court of law. When justice is evasive, the stage is set for a showdown with potentially devastating consequences. Valentine is a haunting exploration of the intersections of violence and race, class and region in a story that plumbs the depths of darkness and fear, yet offers a window into beauty and hope. Told through the alternating points of view of indelible characters who burrow deep in the reader's heart, this fierce, unflinching, and surprisingly tender novel illuminates women's strength and vulnerability, and reminds us that it is the stories we tell ourselves that keep us alive.

A family saga spanning the 20th Century and three generations of Texans in a small East Texas town. Deceit, secrets and tragedies result from Mary Toliver and Percy Warwick's decision not to marry--for themselves, their children and their children's children.

Bob Dollar's job is locating big spreads of land in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles that can be purchased by the Global Pork Rind corporation and converted to hog farms. Dollar settles into the Texas town of Woolybucket--whose inhabitants have survived tornadoes and dust storms and witnessed the demise of the great cattle ranches--and targets Ace and Tater Crouch's ranch for Global Pork. Dollar learns the hard way just how determined the old owners are to hang onto their land.

In this gripping, emotionally charged novel, a tragedy in Texas changes the course of three lives On an oppressively hot Monday in August of 1966, a student and former marine named Charles Whitman hauled a footlocker of guns to the top of the University of Texas tower and began firing on pedestrians below. Before it was over, sixteen people had been killed and thirty-two wounded. It was the first mass shooting of civilians on a campus in American history.

Monday, Monday follows three students caught up in the massacre: Shelly, who leaves her math class and walks directly into the path of the bullets, and two cousins, Wyatt and Jack, who heroically rush from their classrooms to help the victims. On this searing day, a relationship begins that will eventually entangle these three young people in a forbidden love affair, an illicit pregnancy, and a vow of secrecy that will span forty years.

Reunited decades after the tragedy, they will be forced to confront the event that changed their lives and that has silently and persistently ruled the lives of their children.

In the city of Houston - a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America - the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence. And discovering he likes boys.

Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston's myriad neighborhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, hurricane survivors, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, a reluctant chupacabra. Bryan Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn world vibrates with energy, wit, raw power, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot explores trust and love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.