Samantha Jayne Allen has an MFA in fiction from Texas State University. Her writing has been published in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine,
The Common, and
Electric Literature. Raised in small towns in Texas and California, she now lives with her husband in Atlanta.
Pay Dirt Road is Allen's debut novel.
At CrimeReads she tagged "seven excellent crime meets coming-of-age novels," including:
Leaving Atlanta by Tayari Jones
This richly-detailed, evocative novel is written from the point-of-view of three Black fifth-graders in 1979, during the ongoing
investigation into the Atlanta Child Murders. Jones accurately depicts the terror of being on cusp of adolescence: it’s a book about realizing that the world is bigger than you ever imagined, full of external forces both good and bad. That specific-to-childhood feeling of being both in the world and powerless to it. Worse, realizing that the buffer between you and the monsters of the world doesn’t really exist—that your parents can’t always protect you. And specifically, for Tasha, Rodney, Octavia, a sharper awareness of racism. The terror of an unknown assailant who targets Black children setting the entire city on edge is palpable. And though the story thrums with this anxiety, the book is often funny, nostalgic, and warm—in other words, a totally immersive read.
Read about
the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.
--Marshal Zeringue
Samantha Jayne Allen has an MFA in fiction from Texas State University. Her writing has been published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, The Common, and Electric Literature. Raised in small towns in Texas and California, she now lives with her husband in Atlanta.
