Guest Post, Excerpt, & #Giveaway: The Fatal Saving Grace (Ed Earl Burch Crime Thriller #5) by Jim Nesbitt
- Archaeolibrarian
- 7 hours ago
- 10 min read
Book Details:
Genre: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction, Western
Published by: Spotted Mule Press
Publication Date: December 15, 2025
Number of Pages: 301
ISBN: 9780998329482 (ISBN10: 0998329487)
Series: Ed Earl Burch Hard-Boiled Texas Crime Thriller, Book 5 | Each is a Stand-Alone Thriller
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@edearl74 @partnersincrimevbt
MAYHEM WITH A BADGE
After wandering the peephole wilderness of a private detective for two decades, defrocked Dallas homicide detective Ed Earl Burch is an official manhunter again, wearing the badge of a DA's investigator in the harsh desert mountains of West Texas.
Big D, it ain't. And life as a resurrected lawman isn't everything he hoped it would be. Too many rules. Not enough satisfaction. And a boss who hates him for saving his life.
But Burch is back, tracking a serial killer who tortured and murdered his ex-lover--an Aryan Brotherhood gang leader Burch thought he killed in a desert shootout. He's also trying to protect the fugitive granddaughter of an old friend and her four-year-old son--from this straight-razor butcher and gunsels hired by her incestuous Dixie Mafia daddy.
Throats get slashed. Bullets smack flesh. Bodies drop. And Ed Earl Burch and his partner, Bobby Quintero, are in reckless pursuit, dodging death, closing in on their prey.
No place Burch would rather be. Unless he gets killed.
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When a man gets hit by a .45 ACP Flying Ashtray or three, by all that's ballistically holy, he ought to get dead and stay dead.
All manner of official paperwork swore he was dead. All of it based on a bogus death certificate filed by parties unknown in the Cuervo County Coroner's Office, with copies popping up like blowflies on a cow carcass. Even the federales had him playing poker with the Devil, his prison mugshot tucked away in ATF and DEA files, DECEASED stamped across his face in bold, black letters.
The con was slick and easy. Money changed hands, files were swapped or ditched, reports were shredded or faked. Somebody else's corpse became him. The relentless power of bureaucratic incompetence and inertia did the rest.
Yessir. According to all that yellowing, lawdog paper, he was nobody they had to worry about no more. Finito. A shade. A ghost who said adios. A good thug now that he was a dead thug. Muerto.
Not hardly.
That's what John Wayne said to all those hombres who thought he was dead in Big Jake. With a growl and a scowl.
Not hardly.
He liked that. Matter of fact, he just trotted out the Duke's line to a guy he used to be tight with. Caught up to him climbing the three cinder block steps to the front door of his desert double wide.
Tapped him on the shoulder, saw the wild-eyed fear when the dude turned and saw who the finger belonged to. Blurted out: "You're supposed to be dead!"
Not hardly. Said it with a growl but no scowl. Then grabbed him by a greasy hank of raven black hair, yanking his head back and cutting a crimson smile across his throat from ear to ear. With a bone-handled straight razor. His favorite.
Threw the guy into the sand at the side of the steps. Listened to the choking gurgle and death rattle. Then licked the blood off the blade.
Not hardly. He tilted his head back and laughed. Savored the kill. Alone and alive. An endless dome of stars glittering in the midnight sky above the rocky desert outback near Radium Springs, New Mexico. No moon. A dead man at his feet. Used to be a member of his crew. Frankie Sheridan.
Met him at Pelican Bay. An Alice Baker brother doing a long stretch for bank robbery. Had a shamrock tattooed on his chest with the initials AB in capital letters—Alice Baker, Aryan Brotherhood. Blood in, blood out. Ex-Army. Knew his way around diesels, alarm systems, and weapons.
Sent him a ticket to Texas when he got out. Made him a member of his crew, smuggling guns and drugs out of a ranch north of Faver, the Cuervo County seat, a bent outfit that ran cattle for cover and fleeced bitter and gullible white trash while promising them the return of the Republic of Texas for Caucasian Christians only, a New Zion based on God, guns, guts, and the Good Book. Niggers, Jews, Arabs, and Spics need not apply.
Bad move. Frankie was a ratfuck snitch. Uno chivato. Not to the lawdogs. Just as bad, though. Frankie sold him out to a rival outfit of gunrunners and drug smugglers. Kept them one step ahead of him as they chased a third outfit that held a cache of stolen military hardware everybody wanted.
Rockets, bloopers, mortars, and full-auto carbines and rifles. Bang-bangs that could tip the scales on both sides of the river. All in the hands of a crew fronted by a flashy woman in jeans, tall boots, a bolero jacket, and a blonde wig. A wet dream for the pendejos she hustled.
La Güera. Just the thought of her caused his molars to grind. He wanted her dead. No, he needed her dead. She and her lover were the reason his life got flushed into the sewer, his crew dead, his stash of guns and drugs long gone. Had him climbing out of the shitter, clawing to the top of the dung heap. Again.
He caught the lover. Sliced off his manhood. Slit his throat. Then chopped off his head and butchered his body to stuff into a giant barbecue smoker. Tucked the man's jewels into his mouth as the crowning touch to a cannibal's mesquite-smoked delight.
Not the same. Didn't have her. She still needed to feel his blade, feel his eyes boring holes into hers as he gave her that crimson smile. He needed to lick her blood off that sharp stainless steel. Taste it. And grin. Only then would the circle be complete. He'd be whole again.
Well, not completely whole.
His right eye was gone, blown out by a glancing hit from one of those .45 ACP slugs that also shattered the orbital bones. Nothing extensive plastic surgery, bone implants and a new glass eye couldn't cure. Had to stack plenty of cash up front to repair damage that severe.
Gave that part of his face a waxy texture straight out of Madame Tussauds. But it sure beat wearing an eye patch and the lopsided face of a Dick Tracy cartoon villain.
His left knee was also shattered, replaced with a titanium joint that allowed him to walk with only a slight limp. Another five-figure hit to his stash of greenbacks.
The man who fired those rounds was also on his payback list. An ex-cop. Big-ass older fucker with a gray beard. Said to be a washed-up Dallas P. I..
Beg to differ, sir. Sumbitch sure kept him from getting to her during that clusterfuck in the West Texas desert. A real Wild West shootout between rival drug gangs wanting the blonde bitch's bang-bangs.
He was oh-so-close to grabbing her up, dodging bullets and bodies, closing the gap between him and Ol' Dude, who was carrying the bitch draped over his right shoulder. He screamed her name and leveled an M-16A1 at the both of them.
"La Güeraaaaaaa! I got you, bitch! Got you now!
Gonna slice you wide open and watch you bleeeeeeed!"
Ol' Dude spun on his heel and emptied a 1911 mag at him offhand. Yelled this: "Not today, you cockbite motherfucker. Not in this lifetime or the next." A lefty. On target without dropping the bitch. Only thing that kept him alive was a Kevlar vest that caught the Flying Ashtrays that would have shredded his chest.
Washed-up, my ass. The man wrecked me. His time was coming, though. Count on a reckoning. Soon. But not now. He was working his way up the ladder of a list he kept in his head. One body at a time.
Frankie was the bottom rung. La Güera was at the top with Ol' Dude second. Five other rungs between Frankie and them.
Time to get gone. And get busy.
"A gritty and deadly must-read, THE FATAL SAVING GRACE cements Nesbitt's standing among the best writers in the pantheon of Southern noir."
-Bruce Robert Coffin, bestselling author of the Detective Justice Mysteries
"Ed Earl Burch is back, and that's great news for readers who love classic hard-boiled noir, colorful characters, crackling dialogue and plenty of action. Highly recommended!"
-R.G. Belsky, author of the Gil Malloy and Clare Carlson mysteries
I come from a long line of hillbilly storytellers and grew up listening to parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins tell tales about growing up in the mountains of western North Carolina during the Great Depression, about going overseas during World War II to beat Hitler and Tojo, about coming home to marry and start families and pulling up stakes to chase better jobs during the post-war boom.
I had an older cousin who ran moonshine to pay for the dicey operation to fix his daughter’s heart. He later became a cop. I had a great grandfather who was a circuit-riding preacher serving hamlets so deep in the hollers they had to pipe in the sunshine. I had a grandmother who dipped snuff and drank a nightly dram of fortified wine to settle her stomach till the day she died at 93. And my father’s father, a caretaker for the big timber companies that clear cut the mountains, would tell me stories of hearing panthers scream at night when he was a boy, doodling on the brim and crown of his fedora with a pen as he talked. When he ran out of room to doodle, he’d buy a new hat.
I had two uncles, my mother’s brothers, who were career Army sergeants. I can still remember being fascinated with the Zippos they carried with their unit insignia embossed on one side, the sweet, heady fumes of the lighter fluid, the sharp metallic click when they flipped the top open and snicked the wheel across the flint to light a cigarette. It was a fascination that carried over to my days as a hard-drinking reporter, chasing stories and firing up Lucky Strikes with my own battered Zippo, carrying that lighter through hurricanes and presidential campaigns, plane wrecks and murder trials.
I ate those stories up as a kid. They gave me a keen sense of kinfolk, time and place and taught me about the powerful pull of blood and land. They also gave me an abiding appreciation of a well-told tale and a life-long lust to tell my own stories with the written word.
Those stories of family and place still inform my work and I’m surprised when they pop up in the novels I’m writing now. While writing my way toward the end scene of The Right Wrong Number, my main character, Ed Earl Burch, a cashiered Dallas homicide detective, was gazing at the morning mist from a cold camp just across the Mexican border. He had slipped across the border on horseback, headed for an abandoned mining town, in pursuit of the two main villains of the story, an estranged husband and wife, pure predators intent on carving each other up. The wife was an old flame who hired Burch to protect her after her husband disappeared, leaving a string of ripped-off clients, including some mobsters from New Orleans who wanted their diamonds, drugs and money back. Burch was on their trail to avenge the murder of his best friend in Dallas, snuffed by hired muscle sent by those mobsters. But that’s not who Burch wanted in his gunsights -- he was after the two who started it all.
Burch was staring into a mist that brought of memories of loss -- his dead friend, his dead partner, his ex-wives. The next thing I knew, I was writing about the death of my own father, his funeral, a day spent walking what was left of the family homestead with my cousin and the delayed reaction of grief and sorrow I had, triggered by a bluegrass song he liked called “Model Church.” I was speeding through mountain switchbacks when the song caused me to start sobbing uncontrollably, not caring whether I made it to the bottom of the grade or took my pickup over the high side.
The words came pouring out of me in a rush and I cried again for my dead daddy when I read what I had written. I let the book sit for a few days, returning to read it again with a cold eye. I started to cut the passage because it was too personal. Instead, I left it in because Burch is a guy driven by loss and guilt and the words about my own father’s death and my own sense of guilt and loss served the story well and were an evocative way of showing my character’s pain.
Jim Nesbitt has the perfect radio face, bionic knees that can grind coffee beans and tell time and a cat who poaches his cigars and uses his cellphone to place bets on British soccer. He is also a recovering journalist who once chased politicians, neo-Nazis, hurricanes, rodeo cowboys, plane wrecks and the everyday people swept up in a news event who gave his stories depth, authenticity and a distinct voice.
A lapsed horseman, pilot, journalist and saloon sport with a keen appreciation of old guns, vintage cars, red meat, good cigars, aged whisky without an 'e' and a well-told story, Nesbitt is also the award-winning author of five hard-boiled Texas crime thrillers that feature battered but relentless Dallas PI Ed Earl Burch -- THE LAST SECOND CHANCE, THE RIGHT WRONG NUMBER, THE BEST LOUSY CHOICE, THE DEAD CERTAIN DOUBT and THE FATAL SAVING GRACE.
A diehard Tennessee Vols fan, he now lives in enemy territory -- Athens, Alabama -- with his wife, Pam, and is working on his sixth Ed Earl Burch novel, THE PERFECT TRAIN WRECK. When he's off his meds, he's been known to call himself Reverend Jim and preach the Gospel of Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction.
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Wow, this was a fun guest post! Your family history is so cool! Makes my family history seem boring! LOL
Thanks so mcuh for sharing!