The Do-Right

 THE DO-RIGHT

by 

Lisa Sandlin 

Genre: Mystery

Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press

Date of Publication: October 27, 2015

# of pages: 306

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1959. Delpha Wade killed a man who was raping her. Wanted to kill the other one too, but he got away. Now, after fourteen years in prison, she’s out. It’s 1973, and nobody’s rushing to hire a parolee. Persistence and smarts land her a secretarial job with Tom Phelan, an ex-roughneck turned neophyte private eye. Together these two pry into the dark corners of Beaumont, a blue-collar, Cajun-influenced town dominated by Big Oil. A mysterious client plots mayhem against a small petrochemical company-why? Searching for a teenage boy, Phelan uncovers the weird lair of a serial killer. And Delpha — on a weekend outing — looks into the eyes of her rapist, the one who got away. The novel's conclusion is classic noir, full of surprise, excitement, and karmic justice. Sandlin's elegant prose, twisting through the dark thickets of human passion, allows Delpha to open her heart again to friendship, compassion, and sexuality.

PRAISE FOR THE DO-RIGHT:

"Lisa Sandlin’s The Do-Right is something akin to a rusted nail through the foot: it’s dirty, it hurts, and it’ll have you jumping up and down—or possibly just on the floor. Delpha Wade and Tom Phelan are as lovable a duo as any in noir fiction." -- Joseph Borden, Killer Nashville

“When a critic praises a writer’s original voice, what does that really mean? In the case

of Texas native Lisa Sandlin, it means dog-earing page after page in her novel The

Do-Right, to reread particularly terrific passages or, even better, share them aloud . . .

Check out The Do-Right, and see if you don’t find yourself reading passages aloud

just for the sheer pleasure of it.” – Shawna Seed, The Dallas Morning News

"Smashingly original." -- Jack Batten, Toronto Star

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Some books are almost like time machines.  They so vividly portray a time and a place from the reader’s past that reading them is almost like being there again.  For me, Lisa Sandlin’s The Do-Right is one of those books.  Set in 1973, in Beaumont, Texas, The Do-Right is the story of a young woman who returns to Beaumont after serving fourteen years in Gatesville prison for killing one of the two men who raped her.  Now, if she wants to avoid going back to prison, her parole officer tells her that she needs to get a job – and quickly.

Luckily for Delpha Wade, Beaumont is not nearly as large a town as it appears to be at first glance and Joe Ford, her parole officer, has a favor or two he is willing to call in on her behalf.  One of those owing Ford a favor is Tom Phelan a young man with a brand new detective agency and no one to handle all the phone calls he hopes will soon start rolling in.  After he very reluctantly agrees to interview her, and the take-charge Delpha gets an unscheduled chance to demonstrate her office skills, Tom knows that she is exactly what he needs manning his front office.  As he remarks to Delpha, “Miss Wade, you were hired when you called me Bubba.”

And the phone does start ringing.  For starters, a mother is looking for her missing high school student son, a woman wants pictures of her husband with his mistress, and someone’s sister has stolen his prosthetic leg and refuses to give it back.  It all seems fairly routine and promising for the new agency until some of the cases begin to overlap, and Tom learns the hard way just how important Delpha Wade is to his agency – and to him personally.

Lisa Sandlin presents 1973 Beaumont so much in the classic noir tradition that, despite numerous references to events of the day such as Nixon’s Watergate scandal and Hank Aaron’s pursuit of Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record, it is just as easy to envision a city of the late 1940s as it is one of the 1970s.  I, in fact, first read a segment of The Do-Right published in 2014 as “Phelan’s First Case,” one of the short stories featured in Lone Star Noir, a fine collection of noir short stories set in Texas. 

The best thing about The Do-Right, however, and what makes it so much more effective than its short story cousin is how deeply, in comparison to the short story, Sandlin develops the Delpha Wade character in the novel.  Delpha is a complex character, a woman who was determined to fight to the death the father and son who raped her despite the price she had to pay for doing so.  Now, after serving her prison sentence, she is determined to make something of the rest of her life - and she plans to help put away as many bad guys along the way as she can.

Delpha Wade and Tom Phelan make a great team, and here's hoping that Lisa Sandlin has more in store for them in the future.

 

Lisa Sandlin’s story “Phelan’s First Case” was anthologized in Lone Star Noir (Akashic) and was later re-anthologized in Akashic’s Best of the Noir compendium, USA Noir. The Do-Right, which uses the characters from that story, is her first full-length mystery. Lisa was born in Beaumont, Texas, currently lives and teaches in Omaha, Nebraska, and summers in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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Check out the other great blogs on the tour! 

6/6       All for the Love of the Word      -- Review

6/7       Country Girl Bookaholic -- Author Interview #1

6/8       Forgotten Winds           -- Excerpt #1

6/9       My Book Fix Blog          -- Review

6/10     Blogging for the Love of Authors and Their Books -- Promo

6/11     Missus Gonzo   -- Excerpt #2

6/12     Texas Book Lover          -- Author Interview #2

6/13     Margie's Must Reads    -- Review

6/14     The Crazy Booksellers   -- Promo

6/15     Book Chase      -- Review

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Book Trailer of the Week: A Different Kind of Daughter: The Girl Who Hid from the Taliban in Plain Sight

This week's Book Trailer highlights one of the more unusual true stories that have come out of the Middle East since all the madness started there. It is about a young woman from Pakistan by the name of Maria Toorpaki who passed herself off as a boy so that she could have some kind of a life, and in the process, became a squash champion in that mess of a country.

Maria's memoir is called "A Different Kind of Daughter: The Girl Who Hid from the Taliban in Plain Sight" and the video material is from ABC News.

Dark Corners

A wonderful era ended for Ruth Rendell fans on May 2, 2015 when the author died as the result of a stroke she suffered a few days earlier.  Rendell produced mysteries under her real name and under the pen name Barbara Vine so regularly, for so many years, that it is still hard for fans to realize that there will be no more.  Dark Corners, published about six months after her death, is the last of them.

As the story opens, Carl Martin is a writer with one published work to his name, but that novel, Death’s Door, had not exactly made him a rich man.  Carl is living in a house recently inherited from his father, and because he has no source of income other than his writing, he decides to take on a border.  Luckily for Carl, because the house is in one of London’s trendier neighborhoods, he easily locates a border willing to pay him 1200 pounds per month for the three upstairs rooms.  That, though, would turn out to be a huge mistake, one Carl will regret for the rest of his life.

Along with the house, Carl inherited its contents, among them his father’s vast collection of homeopathic “medicines” and cure-alls – including a stash of diet pills that are as likely to kill the person taking them as they are to help her shed a few unwanted pounds.  Unfortunately for Carl (and especially for his friend Stacey), that is exactly what happens when he lets Stacey talk him into selling her fifty of the pills.  Carl’s border recognizes a good blackmail opportunity when he sees one, and after Stacey’s body is discovered, he begins to “reverse blackmail” Carl by refusing to pay his monthly rent.

Ruth Rendell

In a side plot (which will tellingly crash into Carl’s world soon enough), a one-time friend of the dead Stacey’s has taken to living in Stacey’s apartment where she will remain until being forced out by the dead woman’s family.  In her trademark fashion, Rendell explores deeply both the backgrounds of her characters and what is going on inside their heads.  She wants her readers to understand why her characters do the things they do, but seldom has an entire cast of her characters been as flawed as the one in Dark Corners.  Victims and criminals are, in fact, so much alike that the reader is hard pressed to find one to root for in this tale of blackmail, murder, and unintended consequences. 

Dark Corners is not destined to become my favorite Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine novel.  Nor is it, in my estimation, one of her better books, but because it is her last it will always have a place somewhere on my shelves and in my memory.

The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

I have long believed that Stephen King’s short stories and novellas, taken as a group, are even more powerful and more memorable than the author’s more famous novels.  King’s new story collection, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, makes me more certain than ever that this is the case.  A few of the twenty stories in the collection were familiar to me because they (or some version of them) have been previously published.  But as King says in his (very short) Author’s Note, “…that doesn’t mean they were done then, or even that they’re done now.  Until a writer either retires or dies, the work is not finished; it can always use another polish and a few more revisions.”

As it turns out, two of my favorites from The Bazaar of Bad Dreams are stories I remembered reading before  - and not coincidentally, they involve two of my favorite things: baseball and reading.  The first, “Ur,” is a story about the Kindle from Hell.  This little pink e-reader literally opens up whole new worlds to anyone who dares read from it, worlds in which authors whose careers were tragically cut short by early death manage to live long lives and produce books never dreamed of in the reader’s own world.  Who would not love to discover a dozen never-read books from their favorite authors from the past?  But this is a Stephen King story, so there’s a catch…as usual.

“Blockade Billy” tells of a no-name baseball catcher one major league team has to turn to when it loses its last regular catcher on the final day of Spring Training.  This kid is so unknown that no one even knows what he looks like – only that he is somewhere in Podunk, Nebraska, and that he is both available and expendable.  When the kid starts to tear up the league (both as a hitter and as a physical threat to the opposition), one of the team’s coaches notices that something is not quite right with the kid.  That’s an understatement, Coach.

Stephen King

And then there’s “Drunken Fireworks,” the story about two families who every Fourth of July for several years produce competing fireworks displays from the opposite sides of a narrow lake.  The problem is that year after year, the wealthy family from out-of-town easily outshines the efforts of the poor family on the town side of the lake.  The battle escalates every year, but the results are always the same – until Alden McCausland finds a Canadian fireworks supplier with Chinese connections.  Then it’s “welcome to the show.”

The Bazaar of Bad Dreams has something for every kind of Stephen King fan.  There are traditional monster-filled horror stories, more serious looks at human nature, one of the saddest dystopian stories imaginable, and even a poem or two.  There are no stinkers in this collection, and I suspect that each of the twenty offerings is going to be someone’s favorite.

New Nonfiction Book Coming from Pat Conroy in October

Pat Conroy

I have a huge smile on my face right now and I'm fidgeting in my chair.  And it's all because I just stumbled upon some very unexpected news:

Pat Conroy, who died of pancreatic cancer this past March 4, will continue to speak to his readers and fans for a little while longer.

According to publisher Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, a new nonfiction book is coming October 25, on what would have been the eve of Pat's 71st birthday.

The book will include letters, interviews and magazine articles, the release said. There will be tributes from Conroy’s friends and an introduction by Conroy’s widow, novelist Cassandra King.

The selections include Conroy’s thoughts on his favorite reads, exercise and the loss of friends.

Before he died in March, Conroy had also submitted fewer than 200 pages of a new novel, “Storms of Aquarius,” the release said. The book is about four friends coming of age during the Vietnam War.

And there's more good news involving a new Pat Conroy Literary Festival, the first of which will be held in Beaufort, South Carolina, from October 20 to 23.  (The only thing I find odd about the timing of the festival is that it ends two days before the new book is to be published...and that seems a little counterproductive and frustrating to attendees.)

Please do click on this link because it includes links to a whole lot more new information (and tribute information) involving Mr. Conroy.  The man was especially beloved in his home state of South Carolina, of course, but he had admirers around the world and this news is going to be greeted with joy everywhere it is heard.

Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/entertainment/books/article82461322.html#storylink=cpy