Samantha Jayne Allen – författare

"Riveting and atmospheric, a taut and brilliantly plotted mystery that gripped me from the start and held me captive through every twist and turn." -Kimi Cunningham Grant, USA Today bestselling author of These Silent Woods and The Nature of DisappearingTwo missing women. A drowned psychic. A daughter desperate for answers.Cheyenne Mitchell is back in her hometown of Tehachapi, California, and spending long, slow days in a strip mall along the highway, running her mother's New Age store. Her mother, author and TV psychic Johanna Vincent, died nearly twenty years ago, not long after the community was rocked by the disappearance and suspected killing of another woman-a popular young teacher at the local high school.Cheyenne, herself an agnostic when it comes to the supernatural, has spent years grasping for closure, trying to escape the pain of her past. Yet when another teenager goes missing, Cheyenne can't look away. Why does this case feel so familiar, and why can't she shake the sense that the answer lies with her late mother?As her quest takes her from abandoned mines out in the desert and up foggy mountain switchbacks, Cheyenne finds that raising the dead is no longer a parlor trick; all that was once hidden comes back to life-and very well might end hers.

From Tony Hillerman Prize-winning author Samantha Jayne Allen comes Next of Kin, a mesmerizing novel set in a hardscrabble Texas town, where the past is never far away.At a gathering for her cousin’s wedding party, newly-licensed PI Annie McIntyre gets asked an age-old question: what really makes us who we are, nature or nurture? Clint Marshall, an up-and-coming musician and an adoptee at a personal crossroads, wants to hire Annie to find his biological parents, and that question is on his mind. Annie accepts his case, not knowing then that she, too, must decide if she really believes what she tells him that night—in essence, that people are in charge of their destinies. That people can change.When Annie discovers her client's father is a bank robber who her granddad, Leroy, arrested back when he was sheriff, reverberations sound between the past and the present, igniting old flames and rivalries. When the brother of her client dies suddenly, his death ruled a suicide, Annie questions whether or not it was in fact homicide—and who in this family of outlaws would rather some secrets stay buried.As Annie sets out to find who killed the brother—and stays out of sight lest she be next—she finds herself searching abandoned, overgrown fields, scouring pool halls and roadside motels, wondering if she will ever escape the sense that her world in Garnett, TX expands and contracts in off-kilter ways, growing smaller and yet still more confounding. Fearing that in a place where everyone knows everyone, your enemy is always closer than you think.

Friday Night Lights meets Mare of Easttown in this small-town mystery about an unlikely private investigator searching for a missing waitress. Pay Dirt Road is the mesmerizing debut from the 2019 Tony Hillerman Prize recipient Samantha Jayne Allen.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 café 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.

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.

From Tony Hillerman Prize-winning author Samantha Jayne Allen comes Next of Kin, a mesmerizing novel set in a hardscrabble Texas town, where the past is never far away.At a gathering for her cousin’s wedding party, newly-licensed PI Annie McIntyre gets asked an age-old question: what really makes us who we are, nature or nurture? Clint Marshall, an up-and-coming musician and an adoptee at a personal crossroads, wants to hire Annie to find his biological parents, and that question is on his mind. Annie accepts his case, not knowing then that she, too, must decide if she really believes what she tells him that night—in essence, that people are in charge of their destinies. That people can change.When Annie discovers her client''s father is a bank robber who her granddad, Leroy, arrested back when he was sheriff, reverberations sound between the past and the present, igniting old flames and rivalries. When the brother of her client dies suddenly, his death ruled a suicide, Annie questions whether or not it was in fact homicide—and who in this family of outlaws would rather some secrets stay buried.As Annie sets out to find who killed the brother—and stays out of sight lest she be next—she finds herself searching abandoned, overgrown fields, scouring pool halls and roadside motels, wondering if she will ever escape the sense that her world in Garnett, TX expands and contracts in off-kilter ways, growing smaller and yet still more confounding. Fearing that in a place where everyone knows everyone, your enemy is always closer than you think.