Bayou City Burning — D.B. Borton

It's hard to be hard-boiled when your biggest fan and toughest critic is your twelve-year-old daughter.

Comedy meets mystery and history in the summer of 1961, when Houston is still a cowboy backwater - overheated, under-air conditioned, and plagued by daily downpours that bring the Gulf of Mexico ashore and wash crawdads down suburban streets.

P.I. Harry Lark is running a detective agency out of a seedy downtown office building when a well-dressed out-of-towner entangles him in President Kennedy's moon mission. LBJ and his Texas cronies are plotting to get NASA to build a space center in Houston, but somebody is out to stop them. Harry decides that he's working for the wrong side and gives his client the brush-off, but when a dead body shows up in his office, he discovers that he can't walk away. Then Harry is hired to clear a local civil rights group of involvement in a string of firebombings.

Meanwhile, Dizzy and her pals are running a lost and found out of a suburban garage when they're hired to find a missing father who is supposed to be dead and buried.

What's the thread connecting a dead mobster, a missing father, torched buildings, and NASA's moon mission? Harry and Dizzy race to find out before the city goes up in flames.

If you like stylish, witty writers like Raymond Chandler, Robert B. Parker, Lisa Scottoline, and Elmore Leonard, you'll see why Romance Reviews Today's Jani Brooks rates Bayou City Burning "a Perfect 10 book." You may agree with blogger Brooke Gunderman when she calls Bayou City Burning "one of my new favorite books!"

Will Harry and Dizzy save the city? Will Harry survive a month of single parenthood? Buy Now to find out.