Austin may be the state capital but it’s laid back and not perhaps typical of the rest of the state—politically, socially, economically. It’s pretty hipsterville in parts and “The Live Music Capital of the World” says the tourism board and is reportedly one of America’s safest cities. But Austinites, all 962,000 of them, do apparently have time for serious series reading it seems—cold brews, iced coffee and a good stack of detective novels.
A good entry point of course is always to be found in the Akashik Noir series of collections. Austin Noir (2023, edited by CrimeReads very own Molly Odintz along with Hopeton Hay and Scott Montgomery) opens with a few prefaced remarks on the city that might have Austinites nodding along or starting a bar fight”
You’ve probably heard of Austin. You may have been here for South by Southwest. Your best friend may have recently relocated here from California. You might have thought about moving here yourself, then decided it wasn’t worth it to live in Texas. You may have moved to Austin decades ago.
You may even have been born and raised in Austin, and now you’re on the outskirts of San Antonio or (God forbid) Waco because you can’t afford to buy a house anywhere else. Or you may be living in a shiny new building downtown, watching the final stages of a sleepy town’s transformation into modern metropolis. One thing you’ll hear from almost any Austin resident: it was better when they got here….
One thing that does seem to be clear from Austinites crime reading options is that they like a series. Irving Munro’s Detective Bill Ross series starts with The End of Summer (2015). It’s 2005 and a dead woman is found lying on a recliner by the pool in a vacant home in Austin of a vacant home in Austin. Fast forward to 2014 and the murder has never been solved.
The case goes to father and son detectives Bill and Tommy Ross who work for the Travis County police cold case unit in Austin, Texas. Bill is a retired Scottish detective living in Austin who used to work for the London Metropolitan Police Major Crimes Division and now volunteers with the Travis County police cold case unit. His son Tommy, a former Marine, works for the unit as a detective.
Bill and Tommy return in What’s Left Is Right (2015). In a remote inlet on the shores of Lake Travis in Austin, the mutilated body of a man is found next to a burning cross. The hands have been cut from the body and the head has been beaten to a pulp. DNA tests reveal no clues to the man’s identity. Detective Bill Ross and his team suspect that the killing may have been staged to look like a lynching, and that other motives may be behind the killing.
Austinite Laura Griffin writes a whole host of crime and romance novels including the Texas Murder Files anthology series set in and around the city. There are five books in total starting with Hidden (2020). When a woman is found brutally murdered on Austin’s lakeside hike-and-bike trail, investigative reporter Bailey Rhoads turns up on the scene demanding access and answers of lead detective, Jacob Merritt.
Finally in book five, Liar’s Point (2024) Detective Nicole Lawson is fed up with her job and non-existent love life, especially when her first date in months gets cut short by an urgent call from the chief of police. A body has been discovered at Lighthouse Point, and news of the homicide quickly reverberates through Nicole’s hometown.
University of Texas grad and Austinite Chad Zunker writes the David Adams series set in Austin. In An Equal Justice (2019) Adams is enjoying a fast-track career at Austin’s most prestigious law firm. But after a fellow associate is killed Adams is pulled into the gritty world of Austin’s homeless.
In the second book in the trilogy, An Unequal Defense (2020), Adams has left his glamorous corporate law firm to fight for the disenfranchised. A mentally unstable homeless man has been accused of murder, and the evidence of his guilt overwhelming and a young woman’s a paranoid insistence on a CIA plot to silence the man.
And finally in Runaway Justice (2021) Adams represents Parker Barnes, a twelve-year-old runaway and foster-care poster boy arrested for petty theft. But it’s far from simple.
And one more Austin-set series: Mark Pryor’s Hollow Man series. Dominic is a prosecutor, a musician, and an Englishman living in Texas. He’s also a psychopath. His main goal is to hide his condition and lead a seemingly normal life in hopes to pay off his debts and become a full-time musician in Austin’s club scene.
In Hollow Man (2015) Dominic is pulled into a heist that goes monumentally wrong and he needs to extricate himself fast. In book two, Dominic (2018), Detective Megan Ledsome is on Dominic’s trail, as is a murderous psychopath.
A couple of good stand-alone crime novels set in and around Austin:
Sarah Sawyer’s The Undercurrent (2024) is set in 2011 and the decades-old case of Deecie Jeffries’s disappearance in Austin, Texas, is still cold. New mom Bee, struggling with postpartum depression, is living in Portland, Maine, having left Austin—and those memories—far behind. Until Leo, her childhood crush and her estranged twin Gus’s best friend, suddenly resurfaces, drawing Bee back into their shared past.
Don Hartshorn’s The Guilty Die Twice (2020). Ten years ago, a capital murder case in the heart of Texas split the Lynch family in two. Now, estranged lawyer brothers Travis and Jake Lynch find themselves on opposing sides of the courtroom in a high-profile, grisly double murder case—with another accused criminal’s life on the line.
And finally, let’s finish with something special and bit different and this time a true crime book—Jesse Sublett’s 1960s Austin Gangsters: Organized Crime that Rocked the Capital (2015). Sublett is an Austin, Texas based author and musician and all-around character in the Live Music Capital of the World.
Jesse is recognized as being a seminal force in the Austin music scene since 1978, when he formed two of the region’s first punk/new wave bands, The Skunks and the Violators, which helped changed the course of music history in Austin. He began writing short stories and novels with the Martin Fender series featuring Martin Fender, a bass playing blues musician, semi-legendary in Austin, Texas, moonlights as a skip tracer and trouble shooter in the Live Music Capital of the World in the mid-eighties and nineties.
Rock Critic Murders (2012), Tough Baby (2012), and Boiled in Concrete (2012) are all set in the Austin music scene.
1960s Austin Gangsters tell the stories of crooked lawyers, pimps and used car dealers who became known as the “traveling criminals,” burglarizing banks and running smuggling and prostitution rings all over Texas. These Austin miscreants, a ragtag white trash mafia, rose to folk hero status despite their violent criminal acts.
And just to get a little more of the flavor of the Austin underworld Jesse Sublett has also written Last Gangster in Austin: Frank Smith, Ronnie Earle, and the End of a Junkyard Mafia (2022). Moving from the 1960s to the 1970s Ronnie Earle becomes a Texas legend with three decades as the DA responsible for Austin and surrounding Travis County.
Earle maintained that the biggest case of his career was the one involving Frank Hughey Smith, the ex-convict millionaire, alleged criminal mastermind, and Dixie Mafia figure.
So we got from hipsters with craft beers and live music capital to the Dixie Mafia and the city’s gritty underbelly. Austin’s a unique city of surprises in a hardcore state that maybe looks askance at its more liberal capital.
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