The Devil In These Hills

When Gabriel Jiménez and his family moved to the Texas Hill Country, they looked forward to a clean slate. Gabriel, a timid and scrawny teenager, longs to retreat into the throngs of students.

Bobby Kershaw is the most merciless son of a vicious family. With a drunken father and a passive mother, he prowls the streets of Uvalde, Texas like a coyote.

Thanks to Bobby, Gabriel has a bruised and bloodied face on first day of high school. By the end of the week, Bobby is dead. Stabbed to death. And Gabriel is holding the knife.

John Ellis, their teacher, publicly comes to Gabriel's defense, and tangles himself in a knot that quickly envelopes both families - and all of Uvalde.

Gabriel's trial and John's insistence on his innocence adds kindling to the town until it is ready to ignite. Death threats fill the Jiménez mailbox, and pickup trucks follow them through Uvalde. With the verdict imminent, Bobby Kershaw's father continues relentlessly exacting his revenge.

With stark prose similar to Donald Ray Pollock, and Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, Reinert has constructed a tightly packed bundle of dynamite in The Devil In These Hills. A story of tragedy, family, race, and the redeeming power of kindness in a small Texas town, The Devil In These Hills is another honest and dynamic novel from the Spur Award-nominated author.