Book Review: Pay Dirt Road by Samantha Jayne Allen

Pay Dirt Road
Author: Samantha Jayne Allen 
Series: Annie McIntyre Mystery (Book 1)
Publication: Minotaur Books (April 19, 2022)

Description: Friday Night Lights meets Mare of Easttown 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 realizes 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.

My Thoughts: Annie McIntyre is back home in Garnett, Texas, after graduating from college. She's working at the local diner and wondering what she's going to do with the rest of her life. When one of her fellow waitresses is found murdered, Annie wants to find out how it happened and who is responsible.

Luckily, her soon-to-be-retired grandfather and his partner run a private investigations firm. Being a PI wasn't first on Annie's list of career options, but she's lured into the business as she tries to find the killer. 

This was an engaging thriller told from the point of view of twenty-four-year-old Annie with all of her philosophizing about her life and choices and all of her self-doubts. We even get a chance to look at the things that she regrets as she finds herself identifying more and more with the murder victim and the choices she made.

The setting is an important character in this story. Rural Texas in a hard scrabble town with limited possibilities is an important part of Annie and those she investigates. The characters including her high functioning alcoholic grandfather and his lesbian business partner and a variety of Annie's contemporaries who are also back home add lots of color to the story. 

I enjoyed this story.

Favorite Quote:

You can do everything wrong or everything right and somehow it doesn't matter. The realization is both stunning in its freedom and stifling in its unfairness. It is a primal scream and it is a death rattle. 

I bought this one. You can buy your copy here.