There’s something suspicious about the slow moving car traveling past Police Chief Josie Gray’s home at two in the morning.  While investigating the odd circumstance, she finds a terrified, young woman hiding on her porch and a dead body nearby.  That gripping scene marks the beginning of author Tricia Fields’ impossible-to-resist mystery Midnight Crossing.

Chief Gray’s jurisdiction is a Chihuahuan desert Texas border town where the locals are preoccupied with one another’s lives and criminal activity is seldom lacking.  Immigrants come and go through the area with few complications, but that situation takes a dramatic turn when a human trafficking ring is discovered.  Chief Gray’s job is to find out who is moving people illegally and why the unknown victim near her home was murdered.  Mystery hangs over every character—and every moment—in Midnight Crossing, and Fields’ writing is superb.  The story flows like a steady, winding river, never letting the reader see too far downstream. Utterly absorbing, Midnight Crossing is the fifth in Fields’ Josie Gray mystery series.  The thrillers have been honored with the Tony Hillerman Prize. 

Reviewed by Chris Enss, COWGIRL Book Editor, and a New York Times Bestselling author who writes about women of the Old West.