BAYOU CITY BURNING

Harry & Dizzy Lark, Book 1

by

D.B. BORTON

Mystery / Detective / Humor / Historical

Publisher: Boomerang Books

Date of Publication: May 30, 2019

Number of Pages: 390

Houston, 1961: comedy meets mystery and history. It’s hard to be hard-boiled when your biggest fan and worst critic is your twelve-year-old daughter, especially when she’s cracking your case for you and defending you from the bad guys, along with sidekicks human and feline.

Houston is still a cowboy backwater, but Texas politicians dream big. P.I. Harry Lark is out to save the city for President Kennedy’s moon mission. Dizzy Lark is out to save Harry.

Praise

Jani Brooks of Romance Reviews Today calls Bayou City Burning “a terrific mystery loaded with humor, lots of excitement, and fascinating, well written characters” and rates it “a Perfect 10 book.”

If you like gritty PI books set in the 1960s when private investigators were a different breed, then this is a book you will want to pick up and read.

This book has all the characteristics of a Sam Shade novel but add in a 12 year old girl that is channeling Nancy Drew, the hot city of Houston, and the mafia and this all sets the scene for some fascinating reading.

The book switches POV from Harry to Dizzy.   At first it was a little confusing until I understood the relationship between the two and because the story would jump around in time a day or two based on the POV.  The stories intertwine and I enjoyed how the stories merged into one and that despite the times, Harry did not discourage Dizzy from doing what interested her, even shooting guns. This is Texas after all!

The story also hits on racial issues as this is the beginning of desegregation and there are several scenes that highlight those fighting for equal rights.  Crooked politicians and the space race round out the plot lines in the book.

I was pulled into this story wondering how it was all going to play out and as the storylines merged, along with Harry and Dizzy’s interactions, I couldn’t wait for the climax and I was not disappointed.

Some of my favorite lines from the book:

“We still had plenty of vice and crime, of course, but it was the homegrown, loony Lone Star variety.”

“You pulled off Barbie’s head?” I asked. Further proof that my daughter was not a typical girl.

The mismatched file cabinets looked like they had been salvaged from Davy Jones’s locker.  There was something on the floor that resembled green carpet, but in places it had given up trying to cover the floorboards altogether.  The venetian blinds had slats missing and slats hanging at odd angles like drunken sailors.

“It’s like stirring up a nest of fire ants.  You’re bound to get stung, and it doesn’t matter how many ants you step on, there’ll be more ants.”

This was an engaging book and we give it 4 paws up.

Originally reviewed June 2019

Visit D.B. Borton’s website to read the Prologue, Chapter One, and Chapter Two of Bayou City Burning!

Click to start reading now!

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D. B. Borton is the author of two mystery series—the Cat Caliban series (Berkley, Hilliard and Harris) and the Gilda Liberty series (Fawcett)—as well as the recent novels Second Coming, Smoke, and Bayou City Burning(all from Boomerang Books). She is Professor Emeritus of English at Ohio Wesleyan University.

A native Texan, Borton became an ardent admirer of Nancy Drew at a young age. At the age of fourteen, she acquired her own blue roadster, trained on the freeways of Houston and the broad stretches of oil-endowed Texas highway, and began her travels. She also began a lifetime of political activism, working only for political candidates who lost. She left Texas at about the time everyone else arrived.

In graduate school, Borton converted a lifetime of passionate reading and late-night movie-watching into a doctorate in English. She discovered that people would pay her to discuss literature and writing, although not much. But because she found young people interesting and entertaining and challenging, she became a college teacher, and survived many generations of college students. Later, during a career crisis, she discovered that people would pay her to tell stories, although even less than they would pay her to discuss stories written by someone else.

Borton has lived in the Southwest and Midwest, and on the West Coast, where she has planted roses and collected three degrees in English without relinquishing her affection for the ways in which actual speakers constantly reinvent the language to meet their needs. In her spare time, she gardens, practices aikido, studies languages other than English, and, of course, watches movies and reads.

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