J. Todd Scott has been a Special Agent with the DEA since 1995. In his years at the agency, he worked as part of a crew on an undercover vessel in the South Pacific during an investigation of international maritime smuggling, trained Haitian police officers on drug investigations, worked undercover in meth lab cases in his Kentucky hometown, and led a multi-agency Strike Force dedicated to attacking Mexican cartel smuggling routes—an effort profiled by Colonel Oliver North on War Stories: On the Border for Fox News. Todd was also featured on National Geographic's series Drugs Inc. During his rotation to the DEA's office in Washington DC, he consulted with filmmakers on DEA-related stories and movies, and, encouraged by this exposure to working writers, renewed his lifelong passion for creative writing. He has a law degree from George Mason University, is a father of three, and now resides in the Southwest, which provided the backdrop for The Far Empty.



ABOUT THE FAR EMPTY:
Seventeen-year-old Caleb Ross is adrift in the wake of the sudden disappearance of his mother more than a year ago, and is struggling to find his way out of the small Texas border town of Murfee. Chris Cherry is a newly minted sheriff’s deputy, a high school football hero who has reluctantly returned to his hometown. When skeletal remains are discovered in the surrounding badlands, the two are inexorably drawn together as their efforts to uncover Murfee’s darkest secrets lead them to the same terrifying suspect: Caleb’s father and Chris’s boss, the charismatic and feared Sheriff Standford “Judge” Ross. Dark, elegiac, and violent, The Far Empty is a modern Western, a story of loss and escape set along the sharp edge of the Texas border.