Eddie Gato Wolfe is a young, impetuous member of the Wolfe clan of Texas outlaws, gun-runners, and bootleggers, which goes back generations. Increasingly unfulfilled by his minor role in the family's operations and eager to strike out on his own, Eddie crosses the border to work security for a major Mexican drug cartel run by the ruthless La Navaja.

At a party thrown by La Navaja, Eddie falls for a beautiful woman named Miranda, whom he learns too late is the girlfriend of El Segundo, La Navaja's only living brother. When El Segundo finds Eddie and Miranda together, Eddie is forced to kill El Segundo, forcing the two young lovers to escape the cartel in the hopes of crossing the border and reuniting with the Wolfe family.

However, La Navaja's reach is far and his lust for revenge insatiable, and he sends a horde of operatives on Eddie and Miranda's tail, along with a notorious bounty hunter named El Martillo. As Eddie and Miranda try to evade capture, they realize that even if La Navaja's men don't kill them, a once-in-a-generation sandstorm very well may. Fighting their way through the brutal Mexican desert, Eddie and Miranda's only hope may be the very Wolfe family that Eddie abandoned, who will cut through anything and anyone in their path to save one of their own.

At once a riveting thriller and an inside look at the blood-drenched Mexican drug trade, The Rules Of Wolfe is another classic crime novel from a writer Entertainment Weekly calls, "one of the greatest chroniclers of the mythical American outlaw life".