“Dying is a way of life on the border,” begins Mark Gimenez’s new thriller The Governor’s Wife – an intense, exciting read and a stark slice of life on the border between south Texas and Mexico.

“It really is – in the last five years, 50 000 people have died on the border in this drug war,” says Gimenez.

It is a book the author has been contemplating for the last 15 years. Inspired by Edna Ferber’s Pulitzer-winning book Giant and, later, the film of the same name, Gimenez wanted to write a big book about Texas now, and particularly the drug war on the Mexican border.
“I could never quite figure out how to do it,” he says.
“It all came together in 2005 at the Texas Book Festival. I was invited to an author’s coffee at the governor’s house.

“While there I walked right into the governor’s wife. I saw her before she saw me and she had this reluctant look on her face like, ‘I’ve got to do another public event’. She may love it, I don’t know, but that’s what it looked like and that’s when I saw how the book would work, and it all started gelling from there.”

Gimenez wanted to release the book in an election year for the interest level, never expecting another Texas governor to run for president, as Rick Barry did.

It isn’t surprising, then, that the book has been described as a heavily political thriller.

Gimenez agrees that it is politi-cal, in that it is about the fictional governor’s wife, plus the governor and the drug lord.

“Politics is part of our daily lives – more so if you are the governor – but I wasn’t writing my politics.”

 “When I write my legal novels, I write about the characters practising law, not me.”
Nor, Gimenez says, was he writing about Barry, but there is a certain type of person that becomes governor of Texas.

Gimenez’s Governor Bode Bonner is a particularly unlikable character, but one that Gimenez enjoyed writing.

“Everybody is complex in their own way, but I look at politicians, and they seem far more complex,” he says.

“What is motivating these people, what drives them to do what they do? I tried to figure out this driving ambition they have, which they have to have to get anywhere in American politics.”

It is probably Gimenez’s descriptions of the drug war that are the most disturbing. They’re sometimes almost unbelievable.

The border area has become so dangerous that the US State Department has issued travel warnings and Gimenez was warned not to go into the areas he was writing about. American citizens walk in with a target on their back, the author explains.

“There is no law and order. The drug cartels control it completely, all fighting about who is going to sell drugs to the gringos.

“There are gun battles at intersections. The other day, the people of Nuevo Laredo woke up to find nine bodies hanging from the overpass. I don’t make this stuff up – you can’t,” says Gimenez, whose research is superb and passion for his subject tangible.

So has Gimenez achieved his goal in discussing Texas or has he left it open for another story?

“I don’t know if there even is another story, but I left the ending open because that’s where we
are at on the border,” he says.

“What’s going to happen with the border, with Texas, with America?  I don’t know the answer to that.”