Trey R. Barker's Blog, page 5

Lost Highway #2

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Lost Highway #1

Interstate 80, somewhere in the heartland.

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Author with West Texas Roots Stops in Lubbock

(Originally posted on http://www.everythinglubbock.com/news/klbk-news/author-with-west-texas-roots-stops-in-lubbock)

Posted by Brittany Escobar

bescobar@klbk13.tv

LUBBOCK, TX –Author Trey Barker has West Texas roots. His newest books, “Slow Bleed” and “Death Is Not Forever” are set in and around Midland, Texas although the towns are called something else in the book.

CopStories: Listening for that organ!

So last night, Christmas Eve, I’m out doing my thing. Making traffic stops and laughing with people who are either 1) anxious to get home to see family, or 2) already hellaciously ready to get away from family because…you know…holidays. So I make a stop and, like always, ask where the lady is heading and […]

CopStories: First Federal….

It was March, 2014 and I remember standing on the porch, thinking: how the hell did I get here? To that point, I’d only done local search warrants as part of my kiddie porn task force.  This was the big time; my first Federal operation. And I felt totally outclassed. While I am nominally part […]

Newest novel by reporter-turned-cop smears the thin blue line

Seventeen years an on-again, off-again journalist, more than ten years a fulltime cop, and Trey R. Barker’s new mystery series starts on day one.

“…utterly believable,” is how Kirkus Reviews describes Trey R. Barker’s newest novel, Slow Bleed.

Jace Salome is not a captain or chief of police. She’s neither a detective nor a sergeant. Jace Salome is not even a veteran officer. Jace Salome is a scared rookie starting her first night on duty.

She is the newest jailer at the Zachary County (Texas) Sheriff’s Office Jail. That night, in front of her, an inmate who may or may not have touched children, dies violently.

Is it self-defense, as the jailer who killed the inmate claims? Or is it the leading edge of a blistering west Texas sandstorm that might well erase the thin blue line? There are cops and questions on both sides of that line and Jace, lost in that sandstorm along with a jailer named Rory Bogan and a Texas Ranger, will be forced to decide exactly how she defines justice in both her head and her heart.

Kirkus Reviews said of Slow Bleed, “A rookie jailer’s first day on the job is almost her last. Barker, a former journalist who works in law enforcement, has produced a noirish police procedural that’s gritty, violent and utterly believable.” (June 15, 2014)

“Unflinching is the word I like to use in describing Trey R. Barker’s Slow Bleed. A writer who walks the walk, Barker will show you the difficult and dark side of crime literature. Get the nerve to read him—you should.” —Craig Johnson, author of the Walt Longmire Mysteries and the basis of the A&E Network/Netflix hit series, Longmire.

“If you’ve ever thought you’ve had a bad first day on the job, Jace Salome has you beat. Trey Barker knows cops and how the thin blue line can be broken.” —Simon Wood, author of The Fall Guy

Barker is best known for his dark short fiction, as well as his explosive Barefield novels, also set in west Texas (2000 Miles To Open Road, Exit Blood, and the forthcoming Death is Not Forever, all published by Down & Out Books).

With Slow Bleed, however, Barker expands his boundaries within crime fiction. Barker treads a deeper walk into the human heart. Not only is it about the crime and criminal, but also about the why of a crime.

With over ten years in law enforcement, including his present duties as a sergeant with the Bureau County Sheriff’s Office, an Investigator for the Illinois Attorney General’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, and a Deputy US Marshall for the Quad Cities Cyber Crimes Federal Working Group, Barker has seen that the worst crimes, the most painful, are frequently those that, superficially, have no wounds.

Slow Bleed is available at online retailers and independent bookstores either in print or digital versions.

CopStories: Hunting the Hunters

It wasn’t even my case. I mean…it was…but it wasn’t. Part of what I do is catch on-line child predators. I see the absolute worst of what people can do to children and hunt those who want to see what was done. But I also see victims get help. I see bad guys arrested. I see […]

CopStories: The Mighty Casey….

“Fucking bullshit.” That’s my first memory of him.  I think it was during one of our long runs and we were both done with running.  He expressed himself while running so what actually came out was more along the lines of “Fu..u..cki..ng…bull…sh…it.” My most vivid memory of him?  We’d sussed out a local barbeque joint, […]

Am I George Webber…. [Going Home, Part 1]

It’s the end of the novel.  George Webber has been to New York, Paris, Berlin.  He’s spent the entire novel searching for his childhood, for what he lost when he moved to the sophistication of elsewhere. He says, “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to […]

If It’s Too Loud….

I’d heard of exactly…one…of the bands on the bill. Out of four. That’s pretty bad for a guy who’s spent as much time and money as I have going to concerts and discovering new bands. A friend of mine who is absolutely not into metal or modern rock has a 14-year old daughter who is […]