Pay Dirt Road

<p><b><i>Friday Night Lights</i> meets <i>Mare of Easttown</i> in this small-town mystery about an unlikely private investigator searching for a missing waitress. <i>Pay Dirt Road</i> is the mesmerizing debut from the 2019 Tony Hillerman Prize recipient Samantha Jayne Allen.</b><br><br>Annie McIntyre has a love/hate relationship with Garnett, Texas.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.</p>