and Indiana’ packs a mean wallop on its own, more limited terms." From reviewers Carl Sessions Stepp of the American Journalism Review said that "The story alone is a true page-turner, but Lopez aims higher, and succeeds. This is a book that manages to be both cynical and tender, that somehow, artfully, conveys both hopelessness and eternal hope." Stepp described Third and Indiana as "touching, even haunting" and approved of the "balancing vision of human triumph." In a 1994 review Ben Yagoda of The New York Times said that "the novel is by no means a failure" and that it "flirts too recklessly with the outlandish and the hackneyed to be counted a success." The Fort Worth Star Telegram placed the book in "Best Books of 1994" list. Brian O'Neill of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said that Third and Indiana is "worth reading." Publishers Weekly said that in the "tough, compelling novel" the author "doesn't preach" and instead "with brutal honesty, he alternates scenes of despair with glimmerings of hope and, even when detailing matter-of-fact violence, he writes with compassion about those trapped in a world where men like Diablo make the rules and are the arbiters of life and death." Dwight Garner of the Washington Post argued that the misplaced "heart" or "profound sentimentality" means that Lopez "clogs its narrative arteries; the book is pretty much dead on arrival." Wynne argues that the novel is "an angry, memorable testimony to 'young voices silenced, human futures wasted.'" Wynne said that Lopez "keeps most of the action rumbling efficiently along to its explosive conclusion" but that the subplot involving Ofelia and the priest was "half-hearted" and "lows down the pace without adding much to the story." O'Neill said that the novel had some "compelling" if "fantastic" plot twists, and while it does not have a "Hollywood" ending to "[Lopez's] credit" but that the novel also "sort of fades away." Stepp said that, through Gabriel, Eddie, and Diablo, Lopez "manages to juxtapose a thickly meditative study of evil with improbable subplots worthy of Elmore Leonard." From residents of the Badlands Steve Lopez said that the response from the residents of the Badlands was mostly positive. Lopez said that some from the area criticized him for writing the novel because he did not live there. Lopez argued that "I knew more about the neighborhood than most people who don't live there, and I wrote