Annie McIntyre Mysteries

From the Tony Hillerman Prize-winning author of Pay Dirt Road comes Hard Rain, Samantha Jayne Allen's mesmerizing next novel set in a hardscrabble Texas town dealing with disaster. In shock and found clinging to a tree branch, Bethany Richter is pulled from thrashing floodwaters that have decimated the town of Garnett, Texas and killed a dozen others. Six months after solving the murder of a local waitress, Annie McIntyre is working as an apprentice P.I. when she's handed her first solo case: uncover the identity of the man who rescued Bethany before he was swept downriver. When Annie's search turns up a different victim-shot dead, not drowned-Annie questions if the hero they seek is actually a killer. Flexing her new skills while relying on the wisdom of her eccentric, ex-cop grandfather, the case leads Annie into a web of drug dealers, preachers, and wayward drifters trying to make sense of life after a disaster. Annie's own convictions are put to the ultimate test as long-held secrets, corruption, and violence are exposed like the ruin that lies beneath receding waters.

From the award-winning author of “Pay Dirt Road” comes Samantha Jayne Allen's mesmerizing new novel set in a hardscrabble Texas town. At a gathering for her cousin's wedding party, newly-licensed PI Annie McIntyre gets asked an age-old question, the answer to which will prove more consequential than she bargained for: Nature or nurture? Clint Marshall, an up-and-coming musician and an adoptee at a personal crossroads, wants to hire Annie to find his biological parents. Annie accepts his case, not knowing then that she, too, must decide if she really believes what she tells him that night-in essence, that people are in charge of their destinies. That people can change. When Annie discovers her client's father is a bank robber who her granddad, Leroy, arrested back when he was sheriff, reverberations sound between the past and the present, igniting old flames and rivalries. When the brother of her client dies suddenly, his death ruled a suicide, Annie questions whether or not it was in fact homicide-and who in this family of outlaws would rather some secrets stay buried. As Annie sets out to find who killed the brother-and stays out of sight lest she be next-she finds herself searching abandoned, overgrown fields, scouring pool halls and roadside motels, wondering if she will ever escape the sense that her world in Garnett, TX expands and contracts in off-kilter ways, growing smaller and yet still more confounding. Fearing that in a place where everyone knows everyone, your enemy is always closer than you think.