This was a 5 Star gem hiding on my “to be read” shelf. Way back in April of 2016, I was attending the Texas Library Association Conference and heard a panel of speakers who then gave the audience a copy of their books. The copy I have is an Advanced Reader and has the cover shown here, not the one with the Blurb.  This is the first book by this author and as I listened to the authors on the panel, Mr. Scott felt like he was out of his league. Well he was wrong. His book is an intense 432 pages that I carried with me for two days getting any moment I could to jump back in.

The story is told from the small Texas border town of Murfee. Caleb, a 17 year old whose mother has run off and father who’s the Sheriff, is the only character we see in the first person. The Sheriff controls the town and the people in it almost like a puppet master. The new deputy, an old football hero home with a bad knee, a school teacher who has left Austin in a media frenzy, and Deputy Dupree who is running from his own ghosts and into a drug are just a few of the well developed characters in this book. Each chapter centers on one person and through that the reader gets the bigger picture of the town and its secrets. There are several twists and a few questions left unanswered but on the whole this can be a standalone – however I now see from the author’s website that there is another one coming.  Check it out HERE.

This was the second book chosen as my “for the fun of reading” book in January and I thank you! I will be raffling this one off along with The Life She Was Given on the 31st of January – with an old fashioned name from a hat. So if you would like to win this autographed, advanced reader just comment on this blog!

BLURB

In this gritty crime debut set in the stark Texas borderlands, an unearthed skeleton will throw a small town into violent turmoil.

Seventeen-year-old Caleb Ross is adrift in the wake of the sudden disappearance of his mother more than a year ago, and is struggling to find his way out of the small Texas border town of Murfee. Chris Cherry is a newly minted sheriff’s deputy, a high school football hero who has reluctantly returned to his hometown. When skeletal remains are discovered in the surrounding badlands, the two are inexorably drawn together as their efforts to uncover Murfee’s darkest secrets lead them to the same terrifying suspect: Caleb’s father and Chris’s boss, the charismatic and feared Sheriff Standford “Judge” Ross. Dark, elegiac, and violent, The Far Empty is a modern Western, a story of loss and escape set along the sharp edge of the Texas border. Told by a longtime federal agent who knows the region, it’s a debut novel you won’t soon forget.

Click Here to Buy The Far Empty on Amazon