Texas Ranger Darren Mathews is an officer of the law with a deep personal conviction to help solve racially motivated crimes and a personal past that deeply shapes him as a person yet threatens to overshadow his present life situation. Darren is not an ordinary middle-aged man. Raised by his twin uncles, he has lived his entire life under the care and abiding love of William and Clayton but without the influence of a female. Torn between the two loves of his uncles, practicing law and serving as an enforcer of the law, his life and allegiances are split. When the narrative begins, Darren is presented as a protagonist who traded the affluence of a law degree for the true love of his soul, wearing the badge of a Texas Ranger. Though Darren claims it was the infamous dragging death of James Byrd that drove him home and into the service of the Rangers, in his heart, he knows it is ultimately for William: “Darren had decided on the immediacy of the only law that mattered to him them: boots on the ground-hand-stitched, preferably, gator or cowhide- a badge, and a Colt .45. The internal scales that forever weighed on his heart tipped in favor of his uncle William” (35).