Pay Dirt Road

Rural noir has found a stunning new voice in Samantha Jayne Allen's Pay Dirt Road.

Friday Night Lights meets Sue Grafton in this small-town mystery about an unlikely private investigator searching for a missing waitress. Pay Dirt Road is the mesmerizing debut from the 2019 Tony Hillerman Prize recipient Samantha Jayne Allen.Annie McIntyre has a love/hate relationship with Garnett, Texas. Recently graduated from college and home waitressing, lacking not in ambition but certainly in direction, Annie is lured into the family business - a private investigation firm - by her supposed-to-be-retired grandfather, Leroy, despite the rest of the clan’s misgivings. When a waitress at the café goes missing, Annie and Leroy begin an investigation that leads them down rural routes and haunted byways, to noxious-smelling oil fields and to the glowing neon of local honky-tonks. As Annie works to uncover the truth she finds herself identifying with the victim in increasing, unsettling ways, and realises she must confront her own past - failed romances, a disturbing experience she’d rather forget, and the trick mirror of nostalgia itself - if she wants to survive this homecoming.