Pay Dirt Road

About the book

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.

Praise for this book:

"Samantha Allen has delivered a beauty of a debut novel with Pay Dirt Road. This is the best kind of literary thriller, every bit as compelling and hard-edged as we'd expect of a Tony Hillerman Prize winner, with real heart--and a scrapper of a heroine--at its core. Allen prowls this territory with the smarts and savvy of a seasoned veteran, and I look forward to seeing what this fine young writer does next." - Ben Fountain

"Rural noir has found a stunning new voice in Samantha Jayne Allen's Pay Dirt Road, a pitch-perfect literary mystery as beautiful and thrilling as a summer storm. Channeling Veronica Mars by way of Mare of Easttown, waitress Annie McIntyre investigates the murder of a girl everyone wants to forget in her hometown of Garnett, Texas. With its haunted setting and uncompromising voice, Allen's debut invokes the restless, melancholy backroads of the Lone Star State, ranking her with Kathleen Kent, Attica Locke, and the best of the new generation of Texas writers." - Amy Gentry

"It's no mystery why Pay Dirt Road won the Tony Hillerman Prize for best debut novel: its heroine, Annie McIntyre, is smart and complex, the family and small-town dynamics are richly layered, and the evocative language drops you directly into the gritty Southwest. Samantha Jayne Allen is a writer to watch." - Jess Lourey

"Fellow Georgia scribe, Samantha Jayne Allen, has written a brilliantly paced and breathless debut novel. Pay Dirt Road is a gorgeous blend of sweeping epic and small-town mystery. From the stark and hazy Texas backdrop to the sins of the past and secrets that come home to roost, the tension never lets up. This book will have your head spinning and your heart breaking. It's hard to believe this is a debut novel. Pay Dirt Road is a perfect addition to the rural mystery genre." - Brian Panowich