Friday Memes: Pay Dirt Road by Samantha Jayne Allen

 Happy Friday!

Book Beginnings is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader. She asks that the first sentence is posted along with the author and title of the book and the reader's initial thoughts on the sentence, the book, or anything else it inspires. 

Carrie at Reading Is My Superpower.org also provides a linky for sharing first lines and connecting with others. This meme asks that the chosen books be PG or marked as Mature if they are not. 

The Friday 56 is hosted by Freda at Freda's Voice. This meme is currently on hiatus but many of us are still including a sentence from page 56 or from 56% of the ebook. Anne @ Head Full of Books is picking up the slack until Freda is ready to return. I think this link will get you to the correct place. 

Beginning:

At night we rode up to the old railroad tracks on the west side of town, turned the headlights off, and waited for the dead to appear. 

Friday 56:

I scrambled out of the booth. "They'll want to eat," I said to Wyatt just as the bell on the door jangled. He nodded and opened his textbook, sticking his nose in it with mock seriousness. I went to the counter to fill some water glasses and Fernando sidled up beside me. 

This week I am spotlighting Pay Dirt Road by Samantha Jayne Allen. It is the first in the Annie McIntyre mystery series. It also won the 2019 Tony Hillerman Prize. I chose this book because I have the third in the series on my review stack. Here is the description from Amazon:

Friday Night Lights meet 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.