Description
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. The Freedom Riders are inspiring the local civil rights movement and the dockworkers are preparing to strike, so things are really heating up when an out-of-towner entangles P.I. Harry Lark with 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. For Harry, this case is almost as challenging as his temporary single parenthood. Then he’s hired to clear a local civil rights group of involvement in a string of firebombings. Meanwhile, Harry’s precocious 12-year-old daughter Dizzy is running a lost-and-found out of a suburban garage when she’s hired to find a missing father. All of these cases converge as Harry admits that he needs all the help he can get, even if it comes from a preteen Nancy Drew fanatic, and he and Dizzy race to figure out the connections before the city burns down.
—“Borton pulls together all this intrigue—and plenty of simple human interaction along the way—with scintillating, sometimes hilarious dialogue . . . . Action packed, the tale maintains a steady galloping pace.”
Barscoinc, Amazon
—“So much fun and hard to put down.”
Jay Pruitt, Goodreads
—“An extraordinary novel, storytelling that’s so absorbing and so suspenseful that even the most reluctant reviewer will find it difficult to put down.”
Kelly Watley, Goodreads
—“This is writing so lyrical it fairly sings.”
Sandra Garland Hardy, ReadMyLips.com
—“One of my new favorite books!”
Brooke Gunderman, Mrs. Life Between the Pages
