The sounding of the last trumpet in the bullring that shimmering hot day in Matamoras, Mexico was meant to signal the kill of the bull by the bullfighter. Instead it was the bullfighter, Carlos Campos, who violently died, horrifically gored by the bull. But Carlos Campos' death was not a mere matter of chance-it was deliberately devised by a malign human hand! Carlos Campos was not, it seems, the first of the murderer's victims. Nor was he to be the last. Hugh Rennert, retired U. S. Customs Service agent turned Cameron County, Texas citrus farmer (and still something of an amateur detective), believes a serial killer is on the loose in the borderlands. What is the murderer's motive for these terrible slayings? And when will they ever end? Teaming up with Peter Bounty, the slick, homespun Cameron County sheriff, Hugh Rennert is again on the case, hoping to silence a serial killer's savage tune. It will be a clever reader indeed who beats Hugh Rennert to spotting the killer and the motive for the crimes, but everyone should have a grand time trying. "If you don't like this one," one Midwestern reviewer bluntly declared in 1937, the year The Last Trumpet was originally published, "you're pretty hopeless."

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