Nevin’s History

 Dale Walker, Dallas Morning News, 6/5/04

            Mr. Sanderson is adept at characterization, not easy in first-person fiction, and at painting in, rather than troweling on, background history. In his new novel, he resuscitates a somewhat obscure chapter in post-Civil War Texas, the final skirmishes in the long "war" against the charming mayor and cattle rustling jefe of Matamoros, Juan Nepomuceno "Cheno" Cortina. At Rip Ford's urging, Nevin joins a force of Rangers led by the indomitable Leander H. McNelly and becomes a triple-agent, spying for Ford, Captain Richard King of the vast Santa Gertrudis Ranch – and for Cortina himself.

 

Fred Bonavita, San Antonio Express-News, 5/9/04

            Subtitled "A Novel of Texas," Sanderson combines fiction and history so deftly that readers are treated to a healthy dose of the people, struggles and violence that forever etched that era in the lore of the state, plus a first-rate account of one man's efforts to come to terms with himself in this time of turmoil.

 

 

La Mordida  

 Tom Pilkington, The Dallas Morning News, 09/08/2002

            By its nature, law enforcement is often a morally ambiguous profession, and La Mordida, through Dolph's reflections, explores some of the dark corners. It's not a philosophical novel, but it raises philosophical questions.

            What keeps the pages turning, however, is the fact that La Mordida is consistently readable and entertaining. Mr. Sanderson is a gifted prose stylist, and his descriptions of the Chihuahuan desert of West Texas are vivid and evocative.

            The author's deft management of an extensive cast of characters and an intricate plot is wholly admirable. A few of the twists and turns are predictable, but most are not. And while La Mordida ends on a note of closure, Mr. Sanderson has left the door ajar for another sequel in the ongoing saga of Dolph Martinez. Stay tuned.

 

Fred Bonavita, San Antonio Express-News, 8/11/2002

            Sanderson’s writing as improved exponentially with each book.  His love for the border and its inhabitants is unmistakable, and there are enough stories in that corner of Texas to fill several more novels.  He and other authors have done fo the Big Bend what Tony Hillerman and others have done for the Four Corners.  

 

 

Safe Delivery

 T.R. Hull, Tucson Weekly, July 20-26, 2000

            "Sanderson's plot, however, as in all great political thrillers--e.g., John Le Carréé, Graham Greene--is not even close to what is most interesting about Safe Delivery.

What lifts this novel high above the usual genre swill is the point of view. Like James Joyce, Sanderson takes us into the minds of the three principals--we know what each thinks about the other, we know their struggles with faith and trust and moral loss as intimately as we know our own."

 

 Clay Reynolds, TEXAS OBSERVER, 7/21/ 2000

            "Sanderson’s knowledge of San Antonio, and the racial, social, and economic tensions under which the city sags and moans into the twenty-first century,  is incisive.  But beneath the veneer of progress and the shiny glass and steel, faux stonework, and labyrinthine freeway systems, his Alamo City characters still express through their habits and comments their profound love of the old San Antonio that longtime citizens so fondly remember"

 

 

El Camino

 Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review Oct. 11, 1998

            “This ain't the real U.S.A.” a sheriff's deputy says in Jim Sanderson's lean and lyrical first novel . . . “.This is the border.” 'More precisely, it's the West Texas border around Big Bend, a region that Sanderson renders in shifting tones of love and loathing as mercurial as lightningin the desert. “Loneliness, isolation and weirdness were what was not to like about this place,”  says Dolph Martinez, a Border Patrol agent whose basic decency is constantly tried but never entirely snuffed out by his violent encounters with drug runners, arms smugglers and Mexican border jumpers. A supersmuggler wanted on both sides of the divide takes forever to make his appearance and wrapup the plot, but there are plenty of strong, quirky characaters to pass the time with. On New Year's Eve, these heroes, whores and hell raisers all show up for a big party at Tommy'sLajitas Trading Post that brings the stars out over this cold, lonesome desert.

 

 Fred Bonavita, San Antonio, Express and News, 11/28/98

            Jim Sanderson's new work, "El Camino del Rio," adds to the mystique of the area with a fresh tale of a U.S. Border Patrol agent working in this isolated corner of the world, and he peoples it with an interesting assortment of characters of the type we have come to associate with the harsh life in the Terlingua-Lajitas-Presidio corner of the state.

  

Tom Pilkington, Dallas Morning news, 10/04/98

            Nothing in El Camino del Rio evolves quite as the reader expects. There is a romantic subplot, for example, that terminates surprisingly (though realistically). Perhaps the most unexpected aspect of the story is the resolution of the narrator's search for identity. Dolph finally comes to terms with who he is and what the land has made him, and with the future he faces, but it is far from a triumphant resolution.

            El Camino del Rio is thought-provoking. Dolph's thoroughly ambiguous destiny has been shaped by a place he both loves and hates. We are all products of our natural and cultural environments, but rarely in recent fiction has the point been made so compellingly.

Tom Pilkington is University Scholar at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas. His new book, State of Mind, will be published later this year.

  

Paul Skenazy, Washington Post, July 19, 1998

            Sanderson makes the gritty, thankless landscape of the border come alive, from the relentless heat to the failed hopes. The weary citizens assume a battered dignity in their dusty defeat. The story itself topples from its own complication at times, and there's some dangling plot material that seems to belong to another tale: bravado leering at women's bodies, a couple of senseless scenes of religious self-flagellation. But Martinez's life story is smoothly delivered. His tangled struggle between personal loyalty and duty gives the novel a solid substructure, and his emerging hope for self-redemption make him a convincing, sympathetic guide to the tangled miseries of this desert world.