The Worst Detective in Texas: A Hollis Waller Mystery

Hollis Waller has written four novels. None of them made him rich, famous, or particularly happy. Now he runs a private investigations office in a dying East Texas strip mall, between a vape shop and a church that believes in amplified worship at all hours of the business day.He is, by most measurable standards, the wrong man for the job.When Vivian Bell - widow of one of Loblolly's most admired citizens - walks into his office asking him to find her late husband's missing memoir, Hollis assumes it's a simple case of a family managing its reputation. He is wrong about this, as he will be wrong about most things, until being wrong in public long enough accidentally becomes useful.What Carver Bell wrote in secret before he died contains the kind of truth that a county buries carefully and defends with everything it has: old money, old silence, and men who have spent decades convincing themselves that survival and innocence are the same thing.The Worst Detective in Texas is a literary mystery about storytelling, witness, and what happens when the people edited out of a place's official history refuse to stay gone. It is also, despite everything, frequently funny.