The dying season begins each spring along the 2,000 mile stretch of the United States/ Mexico border, but the term is not used in reference to the parched land or the animal carcasses that waste in the dry gulches and deep gullies littered with cans, bottles, clothing and syringes.
Instead it applies to human beings: poor, desperate people in search of a dream. In many cases, the dream turns into a deadly nightmare because of men like Maxwell Collin Ridgeway III, kingpin of the largest smuggling organization in the United States.
But despite the odds, they come by foot, across treacherous mountains and desert wastelands. Those who don’t die from dehydration, starvation, hypothermia or drowning may wait for days, without food or water, in the “lay up” for the smugglers or coyotes to arrive. If they are lucky enough to get further, they are crammed into hot, airless trailers or overcrowded trucks and driven to isolated, dangerous locations, often left to their fate, after saving for years to pay their coyotes for their trip to nowhere.
Ridgeway is Coyote Smart, a fact that would be easy to miss by his humble beginnings as the son of an illegal immigrant. Turning against his own people, he is determined to be powerfully rich and inhumanly brutal, and he is successful at both —until he meets a young lawyer named Faith O’Brien England, who quickly realizes he is the most despicable, vile human being she has ever met. Their encounter may be brief, but what it brings, changes his life …and eventually hers.
Coyote Smart, although fiction, combines factual glimpses (through research and the perspective of a former border patrol agent) with literary prose and captivating dialogue, depicting not only the issues, but the raw emotions of those affected in the crossfire.
