Book Review - "Bayou City Burning" by D. B. Borton

There are hard-boiled Philip Marlowe mystery novels, and there are plucky Nancy Drew novels.  D.B. Borton, a mystery novelist, manages to write a gripping novel that's both.

In Bayou City Burning, Borton tells a tale of the shady characters and high-rolling businessmen in 1961 Houston, then a city on the make and eager to land a contract from NASA to build a mission-control space center in the heat of President Kennedy's quest to put a man on the moon.  Harry Lark, a divorced private eye, takes on a mysterious man as a client to investigate a fact-finding mission from the government looking at Houston as a possible site for the space center, and Harry initially suspects possible corruption from local politicians.  The more he learns, the more he realizes that the Mafia is involved - a point made clear when his client, who turns out to be a mobster, ends up dead in Harry's own office.  Soon, Harry must deal with not just mob infiltration of Houston's pursuit of a NASA contract but the growing civil rights movement, which has spread into Texas like a gathering storm and has sparked violence in the form of fire bombings.

But as all this is going on, Harry's twelve-year-old daughter Dizzy, who runs a lost-and-found out of her mother's garage, gets an odd request from a little girl in the neighborhood; she wants Dizzy to find her father, believed dead in a train wreck, his mutilated remains having been buried.  The only clue Dizzy has is the little girl's Barbie doll; the little girl explains that her father sent it to her as a birthday present before he died.  Then, while Harry is hounded by mobsters interested in recovering missing cash, Dizzy finds something very interesting inside the Barbie doll . . .

Borton has a lot going on in Bayou City Burning, and she weaves her tale through a disparate array of characters that includes Houston itself, a brash, aspirational city that simmers with humidity and explodes with violent thunderstorms, its volatility reflected in the rough-and-tumble attitude of its inhabitants.  The feel is Hollywood noir, but the vibe is pure Texas, where everything is big - including the intrigue and danger. 

Borton brings a unique style to her storytelling by having Harry and Dizzy narrate the story alternatively, seamlessly melding Harry's cynical, sour accounts of his experiences with Dizzy's innocent exuberance.  Harry's descriptions of his investigation are jaded, describing a motel room as smelling of "mildew and cigarettes - that cheap motel smell like the funk of an old man who has given up bathing because his own familiar smell reassures him that he's still alive" - while Dizzy descriptions have the thrill of discovery as when she hears something inside the Barbie doll when she shakes it  - "I shook her again.  We heard the faint but distinctive tap of something small and solid against plastic."  As they grow dependent on each other while their cases converge, they grow closer than they expect to, and they begin to respect each other.  And this is not a casual read; the plot takes numerous threads and ties them together in a complex but careful way, as the pieces of the puzzle come together.

Borton based her novel on actual events in early-sixties Houston and brings that age to life vividly, showing the city in mid-metamorphosis from a sleepy backwater port town to one of the most dynamic and most important cities in America.  I'll reveal this much about how Bayou City Burning ends - Houston gets the space center and helps put a man on the moon.