The Country I Lived In -- Boston Teran

Nobody seems to know who Boston Teran is or whether the name is a pen name.  Not that it matters.  It's the books that count, and many will remember Teran's impressive first novel, God is a Bullet, and The Country I Lived In is cut from the same cloth.  It's hard, fast, and lean.

The book is set in 1955, so I'm predisposed to like it, what with the period details.  My kind of music.  But it's a lot more than the surface details.  There's a great conspiracy plot, and it involves some real historical spooks whose names you might recognize.

The protagonist is John Rawbone Lourdes, son and grandson of Texas gunmen (in one way or another) and a Korean war vet who's on his way to visit a friend in Laredo, Texas, at the friend's request.  When he arrives, the friend has been murdered.  Lourdes is involved whether he wants to be or not.  He begins looking for the truth, a search that leads him deep into Mexico and into involvement with a beautiful woman and violent men bent on stopping him.  The violence in the book isn't frequent, but when it comes, it comes down hard.  Teran is very good at writing about it, so it's harsh and effective.  

What is a man's country, really, and to what does he owe his ultimate loyalty?  Lourdes is looking for the answers to those questions as well as a lot of others.  Fans of hardboiled fiction are going to root for him to find them.  Read the book for yourself to see if he does.  It's a trip worth taking.