THE LAST CALL starts with a protagonist on the edge of an impending midlife crisis. Add a blond and an old friend with a fetish for high explosives, and you have the kickoff of a first rate crime novel. George Wier writes with wit, verve, and a gut-bucket
knowledge of Texas and those who people its quirky underside. This book does not disappoint.
—Milton T. Burton, author of Nights of the Red Moon and The Rogue’s Game.
George Wier's THE LAST CALL has it all: a great setting, characters you care about, a little Texas history, and a twisty plot that's built Texas tough. Get it before last call!
—Bill Crider, author of Murder In the Air.
Bill Travis, an unmarried, unattached investment counselor rapidly approaching his fortieth birthday, conceives that he may not live the most exciting of lives, yet Julie Simmons, his first appointment that Monday, is deeply in trouble. She has taken a North Texas quarter horse racer and liquor baron named Archie Carpin--the last of a dynasty of criminals from the 1920's--for a ride and cleaned him out of a neat two million bucks. And thus begins the adventure of Bill’s life.
Ensues a chase north across Texas to recover the money and shake the pursuit of a couple of rednecks with a penchant for rifles and rigged explosives. Yet, through all this action the compelling tale of yet another mystery—an 80-year old missing person’s case—begins to unravel.
Genre: FICTION / Action & AdventureThis book is a "free" book on Amazon. It is published in trade paperback and is on audible as a audiobook. There have been more than 3,000,000 downloads of this book worldwide. It is the first of the fifteen-part Bill Travis Mysteries. At this moment its ranking is as follows:
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,200 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)
#22 in Hard-Boiled Mysteries (Kindle Store)
#28 in Crime Action Fiction (Kindle Store)
#30 in Mystery Action Fiction (Kindle Store)
This book has been in the Top 10 in the Kindle Free Store 3 times in the last eight years.
PROLOGUE
The concrete-walled room had not seen daylight in eighty years. Its only visitors were the occasional mouse or dung beetle, which died of thirst or hunger shortly after happening along. There was a growing collection of the bones and husks of such spread around in little dried piles. The room’s furnishings—which consisted of little more than a small card table and a turn-of-the-century rocking chair—had been perfectly preserved in the dry, North Texas climate, and the rooms only permanent occupant, seated in the rocking chair, grinned vacantly in the dark, waiting to greet the first interloper to come along.
The occupant was a skeleton, little more than fine clothing over crumbling, desiccated flesh and protruding bone. Had the skeleton still retained its meat and had blood still coursed through its now empty spaces, it would have been surprised at the sudden present that shushed through the inky blackness overhead and landed on its lap, cracking its pelvis and sending decades of dust flying.
The present, a leather physicians bag, itself an antique, was partially open. The bag landed upside down and its contents spilled out onto the dust-laden trousers and slapped down onto the concrete floor with a dull thud.
Perhaps if the occupant still had eyes with which to see and a light to see by, it would have seen the denominations of the bills in each deck of a hundred, and perhaps after a lifetime spent in earnest chasing after just such, it would have grinned even wider, if old corpses could.
Instead it accepted the gift from above silently and began again to mark time in the dark as it had done for decades.
Outside, above, lightning flashed and thunder boomed.
Inside, the dust that had for a brief moment stirred, slowly settled back down.
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Portuguese
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Already translated.
Translated by Andressa M da Silva
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Spanish
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Already translated.
Translated by Ana Maria Castroviejo
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