From the Tony Hillerman Prize-winning author of Pay Dirt Road comes Hard Rain, Samantha Jayne Allen’s mesmerizing next novel set in a hardscrabble Texas town dealing with disaster.In shock and found clinging to a tree branch, Bethany Richter is pulled from thrashing floodwaters that have decimated the town of Garnett, Texas and killed a dozen others.Six months after solving the murder of a local waitress, Annie McIntyre is working as an apprentice P.I. when she’s handed her first solo case: uncover the identity of the man who rescued Bethany before he was swept downriver.When Annie’s search turns up a different victim—shot dead, not drowned—Annie questions if the hero they seek is actually a killer.Flexing her new skills while relying on the wisdom of her eccentric, ex-cop grandfather, the case leads Annie into a web of drug dealers, preachers, and wayward drifters trying to make sense of life after a disaster. Annie’s own convictions are put to the ultimate test as long-held secrets, corruption, and violence are exposed like the ruin that lies beneath receding waters.

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 cafe 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.