In her debut novel, Pay Dirt Road, Samantha Jayne Allen has created a brilliant mystery that is full of the charm and appeal of small-town life but does not overlook the sinister underbelly of a community where everyone knows each other, but they don’t really know each other at all. While perhaps most appealing to those of us familiar with the intricacies and workings of small towns, Allen’s novel is still undoubtedly for anyone that has ever felt a restlessness about their future, a pull that they can not explain toward a certain path in life, or the internal struggle between nostalgia and a bright, new future.
Annie McIntyre, our narrator and main character, has recently returned to her (fictional) hometown of Garnett, Texas, after graduating from college. She is not quite sure what direction to go in next and struggles between the pull of her past and her family in Garnett, and the world beyond this town that she knows she has only seen a fragment of.
Annie is working as a waitress while she tries to decide what direction she wants to take her life in, and that decision gets a big push toward her (supposedly retired) grandfather and his private investigation firm when one of her co-workers suddenly goes missing and Annie finds herself unable to let the mystery go.
The characters in Pay Dirt Road, Annie in particular, are almost all unique, well-drawn, very real people who are fascinating to get to know. There were a couple of more minor characters that, in my opinion, were not drawn with quite the same depth that most of the others were, but that never took away from the intensity or enjoyment of this tale.
The settings are incredible and will be very familiar to anyone who knows the smell of the oil field or the sounds of a VFW Hall-turned-Honky Tonk. Allen’s mix of real and fictional town names when characters are talking about the area had me convinced I could figure out where Garnett was supposed to be. The world she creates is simply that tangible and real.
Fans of mystery/thrillers set in the rural South (think Joe R. Lansdale or Attica Locke) will undoubtedly enjoy Samantha Jayne Allen’s style and, like me, will have another name to add to their list of authors to pay attention to.
Pay Dirt Road is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
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.
