HOUSTON, Texas – October 13, 2026 – Most people spend their lives hoping never to see what Jason Slabbaert saw at work. He spent three decades running toward it, first as a volunteer firefighter, then as a licensed bounty hunter, and finally as a sheriff’s deputy in the Houston area. In Lawdog, released September 28, 2026 by Writers of the West, he finally tells the whole story, including the part he spent years filing away.
“Nobody warned me that the hardest part of this job wouldn’t be the calls,” Slabbaert writes in the foreword. “It would be what the calls left behind.”
Lawdog follows a restless kid born in 1971 who repeated two grades, earned his GED at 17 and drifted from job to job. One night he rode along with a neighbor on a fire call, and the life he’d been missing opened up in front of him. From there the book moves through a firehouse education at a Texas A&M fire academy, a trunk fire that turned out to be a homicide, and a head-on collision that left him unconscious for three days. Along the way are a chance conversation with Hakeem Olajuwon in a rehab gym and a business card from a fugitive recovery agent that sent him into bounty hunting. Years later he graduated as a certified Texas peace officer. The book covers his time in patrol, Parks, Special Operations, K-9 work, field training and hurricane deployments. It ends on a freeway exit ramp in 2026, where he kneels in traffic holding a stranger’s fractured skull together until help arrives.
The book doesn’t flinch, but it isn’t grim either. Slabbaert writes like the guy you’d want next to you at roll call: blunt, self-deprecating and often laugh-out-loud funny. Readers will meet a rookie partner climbing out of a red Miata “like a sumo wrestler climbing out of a sardine can,” a training officer who shot himself while testing a trainee, and a pet rabbit named Bun Bun. He mistook his future wife’s stitches for a chin whisker and nearly blew the best thing that ever happened to him. Those moments sit right next to the calls that never leave: a nine-year-old boy in a garage, two brothers and a freight train, and the officer-involved shootings that mark “the people who fire, and the people who come running.”
Early readers have picked up on that balance. In a five-star review, Kindle reviewer Thomas Dodson wrote: “Lawdog covers thirty years of Houston-area emergency work, from volunteer firefighter to bounty hunter to deputy, and Jason Slabbaert writes all of it in the same unvarnished voice. A body in a burning trunk shares the book with a woman in a bathrobe calling police at midnight about her pool pump. The pairing is honest, because that’s what the job is.”
At its heart, Lawdog is an honest account of post-traumatic stress in the people we call when everything goes wrong. Slabbaert describes the flashbacks that can hit at a backyard barbecue, the department politics that wore him down, and the PTSD he carried quietly for years. He’s direct about why he wrote it: “PTSD is not a weakness, nor is it something to be dismissed or ignored.”
His closing message is for the people still wearing the uniform: find peace outside the badge. “A front porch at sunrise. A strong cup of coffee in silence. Your wife’s hand in yours. Anything that reminds you that you are still human under the vest.”
Lawdog is for first responders and their families, true-crime and police memoir readers, and anyone who has wondered what it actually costs to stand “in the gap between ordinary people and their worst day.”
About the Author
Jason Slabbaert spent 30 years as a first responder in the Houston area. He served as a volunteer firefighter and EVOC-certified emergency vehicle instructor, a licensed private investigator and fugitive recovery agent, and a Texas peace officer with a county constable’s office and later a sheriff’s office. As a deputy he worked patrol, Parks, Special Operations and field training, and he now serves in a motorist assistance unit that keeps the freeways clear. He has been married to his wife, Dona, since 2000. When he hangs up the badge, he plans to spend his time on fifteen and a half acres with a tractor, a forge and a porch swing. Lawdog is his first book.
Book Details
- Title: Lawdog: A Memoir
- Author: Jason Slabbaert
- Publisher: Writers of the West
- Release Date: September 28, 2026
- ASIN: B0HLLK8CRL
- Language: English
- Genre: Memoir / Biography – Law Enforcement, Firefighting, First Responders, True Crime
- Themes: First-responder PTSD, mental health in law enforcement, resilience, marriage and family, career reinvention
- Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HLLK8CRL
Media Contact
Company Name: Writers of the West
Contact Person: Miles Alden
Email: Send Email
Phone: 8322782879
Address:700 Smith St
City: Houston
State: Texas
Country: United States
Website: www.writersofthewest.net
Press Release Distributed by ABNewswire.com
To view the original version on ABNewswire visit: Thirty Years on Houston’s Front Lines, Told Without the Armor: Former Firefighter, Bounty Hunter and Deputy Jason Slabbaert Releases Lawdog
