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Bass Reeves Chronicles II: The Crimson Chapter

by XXL boligrafo

"A century-old lawman, starved down to bone and grief, discovers that the woman sent to kill him may be his last living kin, and that older powers on both sides of the veil have been circling him for far longer than he knew."

Bass Reeves has been dead once, resurrected once, and starving on purpose for three years. It is 2007. His friends are buried. His pistols are cleaned every Sunday out of habit. On the porch of a cabin outside Elgin, Texas, he waits for whatever is coming, and what comes is a young Vatican slayer with a fabricated dossier, three throwing knives, and an order to end him. Her blade strikes his marshal's badge over his heart. The badge holds. In the moment before she strikes again, both of them begin to understand that the file she carried is a lie, that her handler is not the man she has trusted since she was fifteen, and that whatever put her in that doorway has been waiting a very long time to see it happen. What follows is a hunt that runs from a burning cabin in Texas to a shotgun house in the Louisiana bayou to the belly of a container ship to a stone farmhouse in Umbria to a tunnel beneath the Vatican, gathering along the way a Romani granddaughter with her own grandmother's gift, a one-handed priest with a mark burned into his palm, an olive farmer with a promise he made to himself at twenty-eight, and a very old necromancer whose motives no one can quite settle. The Church has been keeping secrets since 1893, and something in the underworld has been keeping ledgers just as long. On All Souls' Day, in a chapel that has stood for five centuries, four unlikely allies will have ten minutes to break a plan a century in the making, while somewhere on a distant hill, a witness who is not permitted to intervene watches, and waits, and hopes.