“The Bullet Swallower” by Elizabeth Gonzalez James, c.2024, Simon & Schuster, $26.99, 272 pages

You’ve come for it all.

No more waiting around. The time has come and you’re ready to do this thing, to seize it in its entirety. No more little bit, little bit, little bit, this is your birthright and you’ve come for it all – even if, as in the new novel, “The Bullet Swallower” by Elizabeth Gonzalez James, having it all could leave you in pieces.

Jaime Sonoro was used to insistent fans.

It was 1964, he was Mexico’s most popular, most-beloved singer, and it was common for fans to leave him gifts. But the woman who rushed to the front door of his home one afternoon and thrust a smelly book in his hands, well, that was extremely unusual. She’d muttered something about Jaime and his father being related to her, that everything Jaime needed to know was in that book, she demanded that he read it, and then she ran.

Taking the moldering thing to his office, Jaime opened the large tome.

And his eyes were opened.

The book was filled with florid language and the tale of Jaime’s great-grandfather, Alferez Antonio Sonoro, who killed an entire village for the love of gold, and whose boots were held by the ghosts of the people he’d buried alive. Alferez’s son, Antonio, never knew his father, but he knew the desperateness the elder Sonoro left behind. Because he was Mexican and good with a gun, Antonio eventually gained a reputation for being a bandito and it was unearned – though sometimes, a man had to make hard decisions. 

Every few weeks, for instance, a train filled with Mexican riches crossed into Houston, and it was ripe for the looting. 

Antonio couldn’t stop thinking about it. 

He’d need six, maybe ten men and plenty of horses and mules. He imagined his wife smiling, wearing a golden chain around her neck. The loot would get his family through a years-long drought. So he gathered supplies and his brother, the only man willing to help, and Antonio Sonoro rode to Houston, shadowed the whole way...

If you’re a fan of westerns, you have certain expectations: horses, dusty trails, pistols, hardship, cruelty, and probably some bigotry. Check them off your list before you read “The Bullet Swallower” because they’re all there. Also: you can expect a truly incredible tale that author Elizabeth Gonzalez James says “is true except for the stuff I made up.”

That honesty comes at the back of the tale, long after you’ve been rounded up and hog-tied to your chair, long after you’ve been tangled in chaparral and novel. More honesty: as the tale moves between 1895 and 1964 and back again, and you grow sympathetic to Antonio and start to hate Jaime just a little bit, you won’t care what’s true and what’s not. You’ll just want to spend every second of your time with this book.

“The Bullet Swallower” is not just a tale for western-lovers. It’s got a Midcentury-modern flair, too, and something for the paranormal reader. Find this book: here, you’ll get it all.