Career criminal Longview Moody, on the run from killers, assumes his dead, twin brother’s identity as the new Chief of Police of a Texas town that’s being terrorized by a Mexican drug cartel. To pull off the deadly deception, Longview desperately works to become the kind of cop and man that his brother was. But when the two lives he’s living converge, he’s forced to embrace the violence within him to get justice…and vengeance.

I received a free copy of this book courtesy of the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I have to confess, I wasn’t certain how or where this books was leading to when I started out. We start out meeting our leading man, Longview Moody, digging his own grave in the Mexican desert in the dead of night. It looks like running money across borders for the drug cartels has caught up with him. I did have a concern though: was Dead Man’s Badge going to end up being a story of how Moody ended up here? Was there going to be a “3 weeks earlier” moment? Thankfully that didn’t turn out to be the case at all.
What I got instead was an intense roller coaster ride of political and agency corruption and powerful drug lords. Longview Moody escapes his early grave but the trouble keeps following him around. The untimely death of his police officer half-brother in his trailer, potentially mistaken for Longview, gave him a chance to assume the identity – a bad guy gone good.

As Moody discovers more about his half-brother, he begins to wonder if the hit really was a case of mistaken identity. In too deep, he decides to keep going and growing into his new, rejuvenated life to root out the corruption engulfing the small border town of Lansdale. The multiple factions vying for control over the area ramp up their intimidation tactics testing Moody and his new identity to the limit.

Dead Man’s Badge makes for a fun read, dark and brooding with a fast pace to boot. What I thought was an obvious direction for this book totally surprised me and kept me entertained until the final page.

My rating: