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. . .

Hard-boiled Tex-Mex by a native of San Antonio, TX. First in Tres Navarre series.

A man comes home to San Antonio, Texas, to rescue his old girlfriend and solve the 12-year-old murder of his sheriff father.

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.

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.

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.

The 1950s Houston social scene, Texas glamour in a world of garden clubs and debutane balls where the freedom and power belong to the men. Joan Fortier is tall, blonde, beautiful and strong--she dominates the room and the gossip columns, but she wants more.Devoted to Joan since childhoo Cece Buchanan's perspective shifts as Joan's radical behavior escalates. . .

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.

Cadilac, Texas: where the gossip is free, the hottest jalapenos are worth the money, and the friendships are priceless Bestelling author Carolyn Brown makes her first foray into women's fiction with this poignant and hilarious novel about four friends in Cadillac, Texas-where the best jalapenos in the world are grown. Everything is calm in Cadillac, Texas until Aunt Agnes declares war on Violet Prescott, the president of the Blue-Ribbon Jalapeno Society, just in time for the annual jubilee. But after the festivities-and the hostilities-are over, it's four friends who are left standing, proving once again that friendship is forever."

Critically acclaimed, New York Times bestselling epic, a saga of land, blood, and power that follows the rise of one unforgettable Texas family from the Comanche raids of the 1800s to the oil booms of the 20th century. Eli McCullough is just twelve-years-old when a marauding band of Comanche storm his Texas homestead and brutally murder his mother and sister, taking him as a captive. Despite their torture and cruelty, Eli--against all odds--adapts to life with the Comanche, learning their ways, their language, taking on a new name, finding a place as the adopted son of the chief of the band, and fighting their wars against not only other Indians, but white men, too-complicating his sense of loyalty, his promised vengeance, and his very understanding of self. But when disease, starvation, and westward expansion finally decimate the Comanche, Eli is left alone in a world in which he belongs nowhere, neither white nor Indian, civilized or fully wild.

Deftly interweaving Eli's story with those of his son, Peter, and his great-granddaughter, JA, The Son deftly explores the legacy of Eli's ruthlessness, his drive to power, and his life-long status as an outsider, even as the McCullough family rises to become one of the richest in Texas, a ranching-and-oil dynasty of unsurpassed wealth and privilege.

Broken-hearted after the death of his daughter, Chadwick escorts drug-addicted kids to Cold Springs Academy--a tough-love wilderness school in Texas. When Chadwick is asked to escort the young woman who Chadwick's daughter was baby-sitting when she overdosed on heroin, Chadwick lands in the middle of a murder case.

First in the Midnight, Texas series. This series by Harris features a darker locale than her Sookie Stachouse series. Stop at the one traffic light in town, and everything looks normal. Stay awhile, and learn the truth. . .

Meacham specializes in family dramas set in Texas. In Tumbleweeds three friends from a small Texas town that thrives on Friday night football games try to move on after a fateful event colors each of their futures.

The national bestseller and the first volume in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood. Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.