The author is joined by a retired narcotics cop as they investigate the assassination of a drug dealer and hit man outside Tucson, Arizona. One of Charles Bowden's earliest books, Red Line powerfully conveys a desert civilization careening over the edge-and decaying at its center. Bowden's quest for the literal and figurative truth behind the assassination of a murderous border-town drug dealer becomes a meditation on the glories of the desert landscape, the squalors of the society that threatens it, and the contradictions inherent in trying to save it.