Winchell Dear is a professional poker player. Without cheating at cards (though he knows all the tricks), he has amassed enough wealth to live a good life on his ranch in Texas high desert country. Unbeknown to him, his housekeeper, Sonia, is an intermediary in a drug-smuggling scheme out of Mexico. One night while Winchell plays the fiddle and recalls the particulars of his past, a shipment of drugs arrives at Sonia's nearby cabin; Winchell's intuitions awake to the possibility of evil. Also sensing danger is Peter Long Grass, a recluse living primitively in far regions of Winchell's ranch. And barreling toward the ranch are a professional killer and his driver from Los Angeles. Waller successfully manages the intersecting arcs of these colorful characters as suspense builds. Displaying far different appeal factors than TheBridges of Madison County, his latest novel is a rugged Texas tale well told. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 8/06.]Keddy Ann Outlaw, Harris County P.L., Houston

Waller, of The Bridges of Madison County fame, takes readers to the unforgiving terrain of south Texas in his 10th novel. Seventy-seven-year-old Winchell Dear has made a good life for himself as an honest poker player, including acquiring his 45,000-acre ranch (named "Two Pair" in honor of the hand he bluffed to win the land). So when his gambler's sixth sense tells him trouble is in the air, Winchell tucks a gun into his boot and waits out whatever's on the way. Meanwhile, a Mexican drug mule hurries to meet his connection, Sonia Dominguez, who also works as Winchell's housekeeper; a diamondback snake that proves pivotal to the plot slithers through the scrub grass; Peter Long Grass, a Native American squatting on the ranch, watches everyone from the shadows; and a pair of hit men in a cream-colored Lincoln Continental approach Two Pair. Connections between the charactersâ€"some more believable than othersâ€"are revealed as the story builds toward a violent climax. Though the prose tends toward the awkward ("Under kitchen lights reflecting off walls of dark wood and partially absorbed and mellowed almost to amber by that effect..."), Waller's fans will enjoy his take on the Old West meeting the New. (Nov.)