Under the Skin

Praise for Under the Skin and James Carlos Blake

“Skin knocks the wind out of you from the get-go…. Alluring, seductive, and spontaneous…. A provocative novel…. A window into the soul of man.”

—USA Today

“Blake explores dark borderlands of the human spirit. He has rightfully been hailed as one of the most original writers in America today and is certainly one of the bravest.”

—Chicago Sun-Times

“Under the Skin is brutal and beautiful…. [There] are passages of pure poetry and haunting beauty.”

—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Under the Skin [has] the seductive fascination of a beautiful song scrawled in blood.”

—Denver Post

“Blake has elevated bloodshed to a high art…. Under the Skin is a borderland noir about love and crime. The real borders it crosses, however, are not just geographic.”

—Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

“A tough and tender story of lawlessness and retribution, exposing the human frailties of the hardest criminals. Blake is a great storyteller.”

—Library Journal (starred review)

“[A] gripping premise…. The historical detail is deftly deployed, and the portrait of 1930s Galveston alone makes the book worthwhile…. A worthy addition to [Blake’s] growing canon.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Blake is a poet of violence…. This is a fine book [depicting] a powerful sense of place, a quest, and the incompleteness of victory.”

—San Jose Mercury News

“Blake knows how to tell an action-packed story…. His characters live on the edge, seeking freedom and adventure, moving through a Darwinian landscape in which life is nasty, brutish, and short…. The fast-paced action keeps the pages turning.”

—Dallas Morning News

“Blake has an uncanny knack for bringing our country’s violent past to life, and for chronicling the arc of a character’s life…against the changing backdrop of society.”

—Poisoned Pen

“Blake’s structural ploy is downright brilliant…. Few crime novels succeed in melding sheer brutality with literary finesse.”

—Rocky Mountain News

“All Jim Harrison, James Crumley, and Jim Thompson fans—all Peckinpah and Tarantino fans, too—this book is for you. Blake [is] a master of style and story…an acrobat with language, able to merge styles, change moods, and evoke a rich variety of tones. This novel is full of stories within stories, passionate and heavy with the fragility, cruelty, heart, and yearning of humanity.”

—Square Books

“All the Pretty Horses meets The Sopranos…. A spellbinding page-turner that captivates the reader from page one.”

—Oxford Town

“Blake clearly knows Texas and Mexican history and human nature…. Jimmy Youngblood is at once terrifying and beautiful, a killer with a poet’s soul.”

—MostlyFiction

“Like his predecessors, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Blake is a master of hard-boiled fiction. Like them, he depicts turbulent times and the vicious ambience of the criminal underworld.”

—Texas Observer

“Gritty, bloody, violent, and…a love story.”

—Arizona Daily Star