My (admittedly very European) take on visiting Houston, aka “Hustle Town”, was that anyone without a car (which included me that trip) was totally scuppered. Houston ain’t no strolling town! Texas’s second biggest city (after Dallas-Fort Worth) and of course a town with plenty of crime stories and not many pedestrians!
Let’s start with Attica Locke’s terrific Jay Porter series. Locke was born in Houston and wrote for the TV show Empire. She also writes the “Highway 59” novels, named after the road that runs the length of Texas and through Houston. The novels feature African American Texas Ranger Darren Matthews. In the first book, Bluebird, Bluebird (2017) Matthews investigates the death of another African-American, a Chicago lawyer named Michael Wright, in the town of Lark. Bluebird, Bluebird won the 2018 Edgar for best crime novel.
Book two in the series, Heaven, My Home (2019) involves a missing kid, a black man accused of the possible murder of a missing white boy who happens to be the son of an Aryan Brotherhood captain. Locke has just published Guide Me Home (2024), the third in the Highway 59 series. Darren Mathews has handed in his badge but a black girl at an all-white sorority at a nearby college is missing. The Highway 59 novels set around Houston and Texas are all searing indictments and commentaries on an America forever changed by the presidency of Donald Trump, the sharp revival of racism and the deep political and social divisions of Texas. The books all stand in the long tradition of crime fiction as critique of society and, frankly, it’s not a pretty picture.
Locke also writes the Jay Porter series tat also takes places in and around Houston. Black Water Rising (2010) starts in the Houston bayou at night when lawyer Jay Porter hears a scream which starts him on a case that takes him into the deep and dark heart of Texan corporate power. Pleasantville (2015) see Jay Porter in 1996. Bill Clinton has just been re-elected and in Houston a mayoral election is about to take place. The campaign focuses on Pleasantville, an African American neighbourhood of the city that has swung almost every race since it was founded to house a growing black middle class in 1949. Local tensions look set to explode as a girl goes missing while canvassing.
DiAnn Mills is another prolific Houston-based author who has a two book series – Crime Scene: Houston. In book one, Chase (2012), Kariss Walker was a TV news anchor who reported on a Houston murder that has become an FBI Cold Case. Walker enlists the help of FBI Special Agent Tigo Harris to get the case reopened. It’s perhaps the worst decision she ever made! In book 2 of the series, Survivor (2013) Kariss Walker meets Dr. Amy Garrett, a woman who survived a brutal childhood attack in which the assailant was never found. Once again Kariss ropes in Special Agent Tigo Harris (with whom she appears to be in an on again-off again relationship) to reopen the case and reignites a killer’s anger.
A few more Houston crime novels:
- Native Houstonian, and University of Houston grad, Nathan Nix’s The Drifters (2013) – Summer’s over and everybody’s heading to funky Austin for college. Nic is left behind in Houston by her friends after a silly crime she committed ends her own dreams of college. So she hooks up with a band who show her parts of the city she’s never experienced before and teach her how to stretch a dollar.
- Texan authors Bill Crider and Clyde Wilson jointly penned Houston Homicide (2007). Texas 1969: It’s a hot Houston summer, and Detective Ted Stephens is looking into a gruesome multiple homicide that saw an entire family killed. The detectives already on the case don’t want him around, and departmental politics can get dirty.
- In John-Michael Foshee’s Justice (2013) Dirk Bishop has a nice life – married his college sweetheart, a successful DA climbing the corporate ladder and a nice home in Houston. But then his brother is murdered when a drug deal goes bad and Dirk dives into the city’s seedy underground in search of the killer, a ruthless criminal known only as Ghost. Actor, director, author Foshee is from El Campo, a small town outside of Houston.
- In Kristen Bird’s Watch it Burn (2024) it’s early morning in the small Texas town of Edenberg when the body of sixty-five-year-old Beverly Hoffman is discovered in the Guadalupe River—drowned in only two inches of water. After elementary school teacher Nichole Miller discovers the woman’s body, she makes two phone calls: first to the police, who call Beverly’s death a slip and fall, and second to her best friend, journalist Jenny Martin.
- Nishita Parekh’s Night of the Storm (2024) starts as Hurricane Harvey is about to hit Houston. It’s all too much for Meanwhile, single mom Jia Shah as her disparate family turn up, and as the storm escalates, tensions rise quickly and a death occurs. Was it an accident or murder?
And finally, a Houston classic – Mercy by David L Lindsey (1990), a Texan author – “A Novel of Psychosexual Suspense”, says the front cover blurb. It’s different from your usual crime novel. Set amid the tony high-rises of Houston, this psychological thriller pits Detective Carmen Palma against a serial killer who targets S&M aficionados, specifically, masochists who willingly allow themselves to be tied up. As Palma gets closer to the truth, she finds herself repelled by the viciousness of the crimes. There’s a lot of descriptions of alternative sexual practices and other sensual undersides to society, though the author (or at least the publisher) claims it’s all based on research with the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit.
