Texas Outlaw

Texas Outlaw is a 2020 thriller from James Patterson and Andrew Bourelle, the second book in the loose Texas Ranger series that started the year before with Texas Ranger. The protagonist is Rory Yates, a Texas Ranger whose work and personal life have been wound around each other in ways that the series uses to keep the books moving. After the events of the first novel, Rory is on enforced vacation when a request for help from a small town in West Texas pulls him back into work he is technically not supposed to be doing.

The town in question is Rio Lobo, where a respected city councilwoman has died under suspicious circumstances. The local police are calling it natural causes. Rory’s friend, a fellow Ranger from his old unit, suspects something more sinister and asks Rory to come and look at the case off the books. What starts as a quiet favor turns into the kind of small town conspiracy story that Patterson and his collaborators handle well, with corrupt officials, complicated local interests, and the sense that nobody in town is going to be helpful to a Ranger asking inconvenient questions.

Andrew Bourelle, who handles much of the actual prose on the Texas Ranger collaborations, gives the books a distinct flavor compared to some of Patterson’s more urban thrillers. The West Texas settings are rendered with attention to the specific feel of the small oil and ranching towns, the desert landscapes that give the books their atmosphere, and the procedural specifics of how a Texas Ranger actually works in a region where his authority is large but his manpower is small. Patterson’s structural touches are present, with short chapters and frequent point of view shifts, but the sense of place is more grounded than some of his standalones.

For longtime Patterson fans curious about his collaborative work, Texas Outlaw is one of the better entries in his recent partnership catalogue. For new readers, it works as a standalone but rewards some prior familiarity with Texas Ranger.