Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite

Jack Rife’s In the Heart of the Beast is set in Austin in the final days of 1976, where Michael Claiborne Duval has inherited a family mansion while running Duval-O’Duggan, an underground marijuana operation with a regional network. Michael has promised military weapons to Lenín Castillo-Braceda, a Mexican revolutionary preparing an armed campaign across the border. The arrangement is thrown into danger when University of Texas student Katherine Levinson is found murdered after buying marijuana through a dealer linked to Michael’s business. Police activity surges across Austin just as the weapons source disappears, leaving Lenín’s deadline approaching with no shipment in sight. Michael refuses to abandon the exchange and begins searching for another route to the guns, drawing his partners further into a situation where the killing may be connected to something beyond the drug deal.

Jack Rife’s In the Heart of the Beast is fantastic historical fiction, with an unforgettable protagonist. Michael is fascinating, his restless intelligence giving every conversation a distinctive quality. The author develops him into a fully fleshed-out man whose habit of examining every possibility says as much about him as his decisions do. His conversations with his formidable grandmother Anna are especially good, showing two powerful minds testing each other through arguments about wealth and human behavior. W. P. O’Duggan has an entirely different appeal, with his fierce independence coming naturally from the life he has lived. His memories of an Eldorado drilling rig make that quality unmistakable. Rife shines in making 1970s Texas and the border country a character in its own right, from fading cantina lights spilling across the raw dirt streets of Nuevo Laredo to the B-BAR-B in the Permian Basin, where American cars sit at angles outside the concrete-block honky-tonk. Intelligently written and atmospheric, readers who enjoy exceptional historical fiction will adore this.