The Farnsworth Score

By Rex Burns

A botched coke bust forces Wager to go undercover for the first time in years.

For six months, the Denver narcotics team and the DEA have built a case against a cocaine-dealing heavy named Farnsworth. When Detective Reitman makes the final buy, he runs a field test to make sure the package of powder he's just purchased is really cocaine. The test is positive, and the bust goes down. Afterwards, the DEA's lab says that Reitman was wrong -- he'd just bought two and a half pounds of harmless, legal lactose. The case is thrown out, Reitman is busted down to uniform work, and Gabe Wager has to pick up the pieces.

The department asks Detective Wager to go undercover and build a new case against Farnsworth. It has been years since Wager impersonated a drug addict, and undercover work's heady mix of lies and fear has ceased to hold any appeal. Reluctantly, he dons his new identity, and hopes that his colleague's screw-up doesn't cost him his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781784083342

Rex Burns

Rex Burns (b. 1935) is the author of numerous thrillers set in and around Denver, Colorado. Born in California, he served in the Marine Corps and attended Stanford University and the University of Minnesota before becoming a writer. His Edgar Award–winning first novel, The Alvarez Journal (1975), introduced Gabe Wager, a Denver police detective working in an organized crime unit. Burns continued this hard-boiled series through ten more novels, concluding it with 1997’s The Leaning Land. One of the Wager mysteries, The Avenging Angel (1983), was adapted as a feature film, Messenger of Death, starring Charles Bronson. Burns’s other two series center on Devlin Kirk and James Raiford, both Denver-based private detectives. Once a monthly mystery review columnist in the Rocky Mountain News, Burns has also written nonfiction and hosted the Mystery Channel’s Anatomy of a Mystery. He lives and writes in Boulder, Colorado.