The transgressors

When a West Texas lawman is swindled out of his oil rights, revenge leads to murder in this classic noir from "the best suspense writer going, bar none" (New York Times).

Deputy sheriff Tom Lord knows by now that far-west Texas is the place he'll always call home. He's spent too much time in the region's small towns to adapt to another place. And that's all right with him. What's not all right is being a deputy sheriff, where if it weren't for family misfortune, he might have been a doctor instead.

Lord's got one ace-in-the-hole—the land deed that makes him the biggest landowner in the county, just as the oil companies have started to move in.

When Tom's approached by Aaron McBride of Highlands Oil and Gas with a contract to set up pipelines on his property, he's more than happy to sign on the dotted line with barely more than a cursory glance at the paperwork—it just might be Lord's way out of a life he never wanted in the first place. But when Lord finds out just what that contract entailed, things start to go sour for Aaron McBride—and fast. Because in this Texas town, Lord's the law—and there's nothing more dangerous than a cop with nothing left to lose.

"My favorite crime novelist. Often imitated, but never duplicated." —Stephen King

"If Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Cornell Woolrich would have joined together in some ungodly union and produced a literary offspring, Jim Thompson would be it . . . His work . . . casts a dazzling light on the human condition." —Washington Post

"The most hard-boiled of all the American writers of crime fiction." —Chicago Tribune