Felipe Espinosa's youth was filled with struggle, violent loss and rejection. However, it is a brutal attack on his wife, Secundina, and their son that is Espinosa's breaking point. Finding them both dead, he strikes out with Secundina's brother Vivian to exact his revenge on a world that's left him with nothing. Throughout 1863, Felipe and Vivian leave a gruesome trail of death in their wake. They murder more than 30 settlers in the Western territories, eluding law enforcement, the military and town posses.
In the acknowledgements of his debut novel, The Vendetta of Felipe Espinosa, Adam James Jones notes that "the life of Felipe Espinosa has gone largely unrecorded and overshadowed by history." The 1860s was a decade of great unrest in the United States and recordkeeping was sparse. Despite a lack of primary source material, Jones creates a vivid depiction of the American Southwest and a persuasive narrative of one of the country's first serial killers.
Fact and fiction blur seamlessly together. The authenticity of this epic historical novel is due in large part to Jones's meticulous care with the colliding cultures--Anglo-American, Mexican and Native American--and his obvious respect for the beauty, fierceness and mysticism of his setting. In Jones's hands, Felipe is just as capable of passion, devotion and fear as he is callousness, hatred and violence, making a simple black-and-white judgment difficut. This beautifully rendered macabre romance will appeal to fans of history, westerns and crime fiction alike. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts