Red Line

The author is joined by a retired narcotics cop as they investigate the assassination of a drug dealer and hit man outside Tucson, Arizona.

One of Charles Bowden’s earliest books, Red Line powerfully conveys a desert civilization careening over the edge―and decaying at its center. Bowden’s quest for the literal and figurative truth behind the assassination of a murderous border-town drug dealer becomes a meditation on the glories of the desert landscape, the squalors of the society that threatens it, and the contradictions inherent in trying to save it.

“At its best, Red Line can read like an original synthesis of Peter Matthiessen and William Burroughs . . . A brave and interesting book.” —David Rieff, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Charles Bowden’s Red Line is a look at America through the window of the southwest. His vision is as nasty, peculiar, brutal, as it is intriguing and, perhaps, accurate. Bowden offers consciousness rather than consolation, but in order to do anything about our nightmares we must take a cold look and Red Line casts the coldest eye in recent memory.” —Jim Harrison
“The Southwest as portrayed in this Kerouac-esque odyssey betokening the death of the American frontier spirit is a landscape of broken dreams, violence, uprooted lives and fallen idols. . . . Miles distant from tourist-poster images of the Sunbelt, this vista of narrow greed, diminished expectations and despoilation of nature sizzles with the harsh, unrelenting glare of a hyperrealist painting.” —Publishers Weekly