Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre Series #1) » (Reissue)

Rick Riordan is best known for his bestselling YA series Percy Jackson and the Olympians and for a series of award-winning adult mysteries featuring San Antonio P.I. Tres Navarre.

Everything in Texas is bigger...even murder.

Meet Tres Navarre...tequila drinker, Tai Chi master, unlicensed P.I., with a penchant for Texas-size trouble.

Jackson "Tres" Navarre and his enchilada-eating cat, Robert Johnson, pull into San Antonio and find nothing waiting but trouble. Ten years ago Navarre left town and the memory of his father's murder behind him. Now he's back, looking for answers. Yet the more Tres digs, trying to put his suspicions to rest, the fresher the decade-old crime looks: Mafia connections, construction site payoffs, and slick politicians' games all conspire to ruin his homecoming.

It's obvious Tres has stirred up a hornet's nest of trouble. He gets attacked, shot at, run over by a big blue Thunderbird—and his old girlfriend, the one he wants back, turns up missing. Tres has to rescue the woman, nail his father's murderer, and get the hell out of Dodge before mob-style Texas justice catches up to him. The chances of staying alive looked better for the defenders of the Alamo....

Publishers Weekly

It's not the plot that makes this a stand-outTres Navarre is a loner returning to his hometown to investigate and avenge an unsolved murder that he witnessed a decade before. And the supporting characters look pretty familiara crooked construction company, corrupt cops, old enemies who resent Tres poking around. What makes this a truly worthy debut is Riordan's voice. Hard to escape calling it hard-boiled Tex-Mex, but that's what it is. The dialogue is terse and the long first-person descriptions show an unbeatable flair for detail: "We pulled into a gravel lot outside the world's smallest outdoor cantina. Three green picnic tables squatted on a red concrete slab. In the back, a stack of fruit crates and an old Coca-Cola cooler passed for the bar. The whole place was ringed by a low cinder-block wall and covered by sagging corrugated tin, strung with the obligatory Christmas lights. Nobody had bothered to put up a sign for the cantina. It just naturally radiated conjunto music and the promise of cold beer." You can almost feel the summer storms rolling over south Texas. (June)