Annie McIntyre is back home in Garnett, Texas, after graduating from college. She's working at the local diner and wondering what she's going to do with the rest of her life. When one of her fellow waitresses is found murdered, Annie wants to find out how it happened and who is responsible.

Luckily, her soon-to-be-retired grandfather and his partner run a private investigations firm. Being a PI wasn't first on Annie's list of career options, but she's lured into the business as she tries to find the killer.

This was an engaging thriller told from the point of view of twenty-four-year-old Annie with all of her philosophizing about her life and choices and all of her self-doubts. We even get a chance to look at the things that she regrets as she finds herself identifying more and more with the murder victim and the choices she made.

The setting is an important character in this story. Rural Texas in a hard scrabble town with limited possibilities is an important part of Annie and those she investigates. The characters including her high functioning alcoholic grandfather and his lesbian business partner and a variety of Annie's contemporaries who are also back home add lots of color to the story.

I enjoyed this story. ( )

This is the story of Annie, a young woman returning to her hometown in Texas after college. She gets a job as a waitress at the local cafe, working alongside Victoria, a single mom. When Annie finds out the day after a bonfire party (which Annie attended and saw Victoria there) that Victoria is missing, she becomes worried and decides to investigate.

Annie teams up with her grandfather, a former Sheriff, and his assistant Mary-Pat to investigate. Annie does not have great investigative skills but she perseveres.

The book was interesting, but I didn't find it completely engrossing. I thought the ending was good and I didn't figure out who it was until close to the end, although some readers may figure it out early on. I could, however, see this being written as a series as Annie hones her investigative skills. ( )

Annie McIntyre has recently returned home to small town Garnett, Texas after graduating college. Unsure of her next step, she lives with her cousin, Nikki, and takes a job waitressing at the town’s café. At night, she and Nikki who is a year older, get together with old high school friends and do what kids do in small towns, have parties and drink.
It is at her friend Justin Schneider’s bonfire one Friday night that she sees her café co-worker, Victoria, clearly drunk weaving through the crowd. However, Annie is too focused on Nikki who is causing a scene with some of the girls at the bonfire, to check on Victoria.
When Victoria doesn’t show up for her shift the next day, café owner Marlene is pissed. When she doesn’t answer her phone and isn’t at her house, Annie gets worried. However, when her dead body is found in the woods on Annie’s grandfather, Leroy’s isolated property, Annie’s guilty conscience makes her determined to find Victoria’s killer. While the police have arrested a suspect, Fernando the cook at the café Annie works at, she is not convinced he is the killer.
Annie comes from a long line of law enforcement officers. Her father and grandfather, both, were police officers, Leroy having been sheriff. Leroy now runs a private investigation firm with partner, Mary-Pat, who has asked Annie to help out in the office doing clerical work. Annie, however, uses that entrée to investigate on her own. Additionally, Fernando’s mother has hired Mary-Pat to clear her son.
While Annie is learning the ropes from Leroy and Mary-Pat, her inexperience at investigation leads her down wrong paths and puts her life in danger.
Both talking to and interrogating her old friends brings up repressed memories of high school parties and their aftermath. Additionally, as the investigation proceeds, she learns long hidden family secrets.
One reviewer said that Pay Dirt Road is “…that rarity in private-eye fiction: a coming of age story.” We’re not dealing with the grizzled, cynical PI who’s been at it for years. Annie is young, undecided about her future. The only thing she knows for sure is that she wants the truth.
Allen has put together a finely written, tense mystery. Not only is the investigation interesting, her writing provides a powerful sense of place. Readers get a feel for the dry, desolate, dying town of Garnett with its dusty winds, oil fields, scrub grass and residents hoping to leave one day. It conjures up images of Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show. ( )

Annie McIntyre, the main character, has recently returned to her (hometown of Garnett, Texas, after she had graduated from college. She is not quite sure what direction to next take and struggles between the pull of her past, her family, and the world beyond this small town that she knows she has only seen a small part of. She's working as a waitress while she tries to decide what direction she wants to take. That decision gets a big push toward her supposedly retired grandfather and his private investigation firm. One of her co-workers suddenly goes missing and Annie finds herself unable to let this mystery go. The characters...Annie especially, are all unique, well-drawn, very real people who are fascinating to meet and get to know. There were a couple more minor characters that, in my opinion, were not drawn out with quite the same depth that the others were, but that never took away from the intensity or the enjoyment of the story. The settings will be very familiar to anyone who knows the smell of the oil field or the sounds of a VFW Hall Honky-Tonk. The world she creates is simply tangible and real and the twist at the end is surprising and dramatic. ( )

How this book got such high praise is completely beyond me.
All of the characters are boring, uninteresting, and completely one dimensional.
The mystery is barely a mystery.
You have:
The big bad oil company
The one rich family in town
The main character’s strange, whacky family.
The main character Annie, who narrates the story, goes off on deep thinking tangents that have nothing to do with much less add to the story.
The whole book reads like a boring YA book.
God I wish I hadn’t wasted time reading this. ( )