Line in the Sand (PB) (2018)

When are you safe? Who do you trust? When is it right to do wrong?
These questions drive the characters in "Line in the Sand." Desperate choices will be made in the first few minutes of the story, and plot twists will come down to the last few pages. Packed in between are action, psychological suspense, admirable courage, and undeniable terror. Killers will be killed; authorities will be lied to; young people in their first act of adulthood will go against everything they've ever learned or wanted. In the end, life and hope are chosen over fear and death; a new family is formed; a new future is imagined.
The story works both sides of the southwestern U.S. border and revolves around a vendetta by a drug cartel against two refugee boys, who wind up under the hastily improvised protection of a Phoenix elementary school teacher and janitor. This unlikely band defeats hired killers but then must hide their victory even from the police out of fear of retribution from the seemingly omnipotent and utterly evil cartel. At the same time, we are also seeing the events from the side of the narcos, who, it turns out, have their own fears and failings.