South of the border, everyone is for sale. Everyone but Rudd Carter. Carter is a rarity: A martial arts expert and hired gun born to an aristocratic English family. He worked undercover for the British in China, helping put down the Boxer Rebellion. Now, in 1922, in the lawless Mexican desert, a conspiracy is brewing. Ben Mosier is a cigar-chomping American who runs hotels, casinos, bootlegging and brothels. He’s plenty rich, but he lusts for more, even if it means corrupting local authorities and seizing a foreign country. Maybe Rudd Carter has something to prove to his family — for banishing him, when he fell in love with his 16-year-old cousin and got her pregnant. He’s picked up a useful but unstable lieutenant, who enjoys watching people drown in their own blood. Now at Mosier’s hotel he meets stunning Kathryn. She just plays the violin — so cool and aloof, as if she’s not tainted, too. Carter is a genius at war for hire. Eleven years ago his Devil’s Squadron — 50 ruthless killers — struck the fateful blow in the Battle of Juarez, deciding the Mexican revolution. Now Mosier and his cronies hire Carter to raise a new cadre of fighters. Why? To provoke another Mexican uprising. But the last thing they have in mind is revolution of, by or for the people. Carter’s always chosen the right battle at the right time. In Kathryn, he’s finally found the woman he wants to spend his life with. Here’s Mosier, promising to make him rich. Just this one more job, and he can kiss killing goodbye forever. But something about this plan is beginning to smell. Something Carter can’t see and isn’t being told is making him queasy. Is it the truth behind Mosier’s harebrained scheme — or the fear that his own luck and cunning are about to run out?