Next of Kin

February 19, 2024
Annie McIntyre deals with bloodshed and blood relations in Allen’s atmospheric third whodunit featuring the 26-year-old PI (after Hard Rain). It’s a sweltering August in the small town of Garnett, Tex., and Annie has her plate full as maid of honor for her cousin Nikki’s wedding. During one of the prenuptial parties, she’s approached by local musician Clint Marshall, the groom’s brother and best man. Adopted as a baby, he wants Annie to help him find his birth parents. The case seems straightforward enough: Annie uses Ancestry.com to locate Clint’s biological brother, Cody, and his father, who’s serving time in prison for a years-old bank robbery. Things take a turn, however, when Cody is found dead and Clint disappears. With the aid of her 85-year-old grandfather, Leroy, a former county sheriff, and his former deputy, Mary-Pat Zimmerman, Annie searches West Texas’s bars and motels in search of answers. Eventually, she turns her focus to Clint’s jailbird father. Allen conjures a suitably noirish mood from the opening pages, and renders even her secondary characters in three dimensions. With regional intrigue and plenty of satisfying sleuthing, this series merits a long run.

March 15, 2024
A man's search for his birth parents opens a door to dangers arising from the past. Following in her family's footsteps, Annie McIntyre works as a private investigator in her hometown of Garnett, Texas. She and her boyfriend, Wyatt, attend a party for her cousin Nikki and her fiance, Sonny, thrown by his best man and adopted brother, Clint Marshall, a talented singer poised to make it big in country music. A discussion about nature versus nurture spurs Clint to hire Annie to find his birth parents, opening a nasty can of worms. Clint, who was adopted out of foster care at age 4, has a few faint memories, and a DNA test he's recently taken turned up a distant cousin. Annie quickly learns that his birth father is Ronald Mott, who's currently incarcerated for armed bank robbery. His mother is presumably Lorena, Mott's wife at the time. His adoptive mother, oddly enough, was a teller at the bank Mott robbed. Ignoring the advice of her grandfather Leroy, a former sheriff, to avoid Mott, whom he considers a dangerous sociopath, Annie writes to him in hopes of confirming that his ex-wife was Clint's mother and also interviews a skittish Mott neighbor whose daughter vanished years ago. Lorena won't talk to Annie, but her son, Cody, who's obviously Clint's brother, will. Cody's involved with a dangerous drug dealer, who starts harassing Annie. Clint takes off after Annie reports her findings, leaving her to deal with the fallout. Although she's done what Clint wanted, Annie can't let go of the case, which might just be the death of her. A gritty tale of troublesome family dynamics with a tough and determined protagonist.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 1, 2024
The third Annie McIntyre Mysteries title is set, like the previous two, in a claustrophobically small town in central Texas (the first in Allen's series, Pay Dirt Road [2022], won the Tony Hillerman Prize for Best First Mystery set in the Southwest). When Annie, now 24, returned to her hometown after college, she was at loose ends until her grandfather, a retired sheriff, enlisted her to work for his detective agency. Nancy Drewish Annie is able to move freely in different places, like the local caf� and sketchy roadside bars, and question people her grandfather couldn't approach without setting off alarms. This mystery kicks off with a strange request. On the eve of a local wedding, the groom's brother-by-adoption asks Annie to find out who his biological parents are. Since tracing one's roots is so easy now, Annie wonders if she's being set up. Disturbing discoveries follow about the biological father, a death that may be suicide or murder tears apart the town, and Annie has reason to fear she's at the center of a lethal web. Allen's engaging heroine, sharp descriptions of life in a struggling small town, and a breakneck plot will make readers itch for the next in the series.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 29, 2024

Before musician Clint Marshall leaves Garnett, TX, for Nashville, he asks private investigator Annie McIntyre to take his case. Clint was adopted out of foster care when he was four, and he wants Annie to find his birth parents. But it's not a good idea to take adoption cases in a small community where everyone knows each other. It only takes a day for Annie to discover that Clint's birth father is in prison for bank robbery, and he has a biological brother, Clay, who lives nearby, and has been involved with a local drug dealer. When Clint disappears, and Annie finds his brother dead, supposedly by suicide, she throws herself into a case in which no one wants to know what Annie uncovers. She's followed and intimidated, and everyone from her grandfather to the drug dealer to the police wants to shut down her investigation. VERDICT The atmospheric mystery from the Tony Hillerman Award-winning author of McIntyre series opener Pay Dirt Road is a descriptive novel featuring a young PI who analyzes her own feelings about her job and hometown as she searches for answers in the gritty pool halls, in the rundown motels, and on the dusty roads of Texas.--Lesa Holstine

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