So at first, I didn't realize Hard Rain was a continuum of Pay Dirt Road by Samantha Jayne Allen as the character of Annie sounded familiar. In Hard Rain, a terrible flood comes thrashing through Texas and a young woman, Bethany, is left stuck in a tree until a stranger rescues her. The stranger however gets swept away! Bethany hires Annie to figure out who this mystery person is. Annie is sucked into a world of violence, drugs and the wrong crowd. Hard Rain was a good but I just couldn't immerse myself into the story. A solid 3-star.

I loved this mystery thriller because of the strong characters, thrilling plot, and excellent description of the setting. It felt as if I was there with the characters in rising flood waters with stakes that were life and death.

Thank you to netgalley.com for this ARC.

This is the second book in the Annie McIntyre private investigator series. Taking place in a small town in Texas with a cast of quirky and flawed characters, I enjoyed the second book in the series even more than the first.

Annie is a vulnerable, big hearted, brave character new to the world of private investigating founded by her grandfather and his partner. The mystery is set up well and plays through to the end of the book.

Looking forward to seeing how the series develops going forward.

Bethany is married to the preacher of a mega church. She is almost swept away in a flood but is saved by a mysterious long haired man. Bethany is determined to find the man who saved her life. What follows is a twisty story with a wonderfully descriptive setting of the Texas hill country.

A rookie private investigator gets her first solo case to find a missing Good Samaritan in her small town. Along the way, she runs across a growing drug problem and finds disturbing evidence it may be connected to her case. Author Samantha Jayne Allen brings back the brooding young woman from her first book in this follow-up novel that plods along in her new release Hard Rain.

Six months after Annie Garnett solved the murder of a local waitress in Garnett, Texas, she’s starting to find her groove as a private investigator under the watchful eye of her grandfather, Leroy, and his business partner, Mary-Pat. She’s an apprentice at their PI firm and spends a lot of time chasing down small insurance claims and other busy work. With Leroy slowly easing into retirement and Mary-Pat the big gun in the office, Annie has to settle for the smaller cases.

Until one walks into the office begging for her—literally. Shortly after a major rain event causes disastrous flooding in Garnett, Bethany Richter comes to the PI firm looking for help. Despite the threat of the storm, Bethany and her married friends, Michael and Kendall, went to a cabin close to the river for the weekend. The heavy flooding washed out the cabin, leaving Bethany stranded in the river’s forceful currents. A man popped up out of nowhere and saved Bethany. When she reached the bank of the river, he’d disappeared.

Michael and Kendall lost their lives in the flood, and Bethany is beside herself with grief. Now she’s determined to make some good come of it. Bethany wants Annie’s help to find the man so she can thank him for saving her life. If he died saving her, she says, she wants to find his family so she can show them her gratitude.

With only a vague description that the man “looked like Jesus,” Annie sets out to track him down. As she sifts through the little evidence on hand, it forces her to consider the deaths of Michael and Kendall. Michael was the youth pastor at Hillview, the church where Bethany’s husband and father-in-law lead worship every Sunday.

Oddly enough, no matter where Annie turns, everything leads back to Hillview in some way. During her investigation, she runs across a dead body and discovers the woman, Jacinda, was a former member of Hillview. Strong rumor had it Jacinda was into drugs in some way or the other, although no one knows for sure whether she was dealing, using, or both.

Also strange is the fact that Bethany’s husband, John David, was supposed to join the others for the weekend away at the cabin. Bethany explains he was pulled away at the last minute by pastoral duties, but after interviewing him Annie is sure he’s hiding something. As she interrogates old friends and acquaintances, she also has to come to terms with the hardships of small-town life and the dreams she once had for herself that she’s given up.

Author Samantha Jayne Allen’s descriptions and settings will impress with deep authenticity the weight of the Texas heat and how small town life moves in it. With detailed prose, Allen has no trouble making readers see the landscape and feel the glacial pace of Garnett’s residents. Of note is the way the river acts almost as a character in and of itself in the book.

Unfortunately, the story’s pacing also moves glacially. Allen’s thoughtful, methodical approach in the first book featuring Annie reminded readers to pause for the story. Here, the same approach doesn’t work. Instead, it seems like much of the description is filler for what is actually a small case.

Annie often reflects on how everyone in Garnett seems to know everyone else and, subsequently, everyone’s business. It’s somewhat baffling, then, that the case takes as long as it does to figure out. At one point late in the book, a chapter starts to pick up momentum only to have it completely stopped on the next page that states “one month later” with absolutely no explanation given for the time gap or even what Annie was doing during it.

The resolution feels rushed and almost of a different tone than the rest of the book. It comes so late, in fact, that most savvy readers will have figured out the case for Annie long before she does. Those who enjoy a book heavy on elements of literary fiction with some thriller features might like this one.

This is book 2 in the series and it’s a good sequel. It starts with one of those rainstorms that floods the town and a former schoolmate getting saved by a random stranger. This sets off a series of related events that nicely tie in at the end. There was more development on the other characters, especially her family. I’d recommend this to anyone who enjoys a mystery with depth.

I enjoyed Samantha's first book, Pay Dirt Road and this was a great followup in the series. After massive flooding, a pastor's wife survives it and hires Annie to find her rescuer. What Annie finds will open up a whole new can of worms in the town. A great mystery series.

I received a free copy from NetGalley. I had read the other book in this series and I think doing so helped understand the main characters better. Interesting set up for the mystery. I look forward to others in this series should it continue.

Date is for the review, not the reading.

This is the second book in the series and Annie continues to be a great female character. Allen continues to expand the depth of the Annie’s character. The best part of the character is that as she learns and grows she questions everything. This cycle of learning, growing and questioning makes for a great role model format for all readers.

“A Hard Rain” opens with the storm of the century taking place in Garnett, Texas. Two couples, Pastor John David and Bethany Richter and Kendall and Youth Pastor Michael Davis, are on a weekend getaway to celebrate Bethany’s birthday. John David was called away by his father to perform last rights, and Bethany woke to a weather alert on her cell phone to see water seeping in the door, even though the cabin was set on twenty-foot pilings. She stepped out to the bedroom balcony to survey the river when it collapsed, plunging her into the rising waters. Repeatedly pulled under and sure she would drown, she was thrown out and landed on a piece of broken concrete. A man appeared, who looked “like Jesus,” repeatedly telling her to swim to him; he threw her to safety where she was able to grab and wrap herself around a tree limb. Already in the water to bring her to safety, he disappeared downstream. Bethany turns to apprentice PI Annie McIntyre for help finding her mysterious savior. Annie is assigned to the case with advice from her PI ex-policeman grandfather Leroy and Mary-Pat Zimmerman, his partner at the agency. Still trying to process and adjust to life after a natural disaster (“Outside, the world had a violent shine to it” location 77 of 4261), Annie will have her core beliefs shaken when the investigation leads her to greed, corruption, drug dealers, drifters, violence, secrets, lies, and more.

After six months of errands and paperwork, Annie McIntyre is assigned her first real investigative case. “Six months into my work as an apprentice investigator, I knew enough about loss—real loss—to be afraid of it, and yet, there was some part of me that kept tempting darkness. That wanted to look at the monster under the bed. Maybe I was a voyeur—why else be drawn to this line of work? Or maybe, I hoped, there was another, better version of me, braver than I felt most days, who would come to life if I dared peer back.” (location 89 of 4261) From the moment the book opens in the process of a dramatic almost-drowning, heroic rescue, and aftermath of death and destruction, the reader becomes enamored with and wants to devour all of the word pictures drawn by the mind of author Samantha Jayne Allen. There are plenty of twists and turns, and an undercurrent of anger and malice throughout that propel the story along at high speed. It’s eye-opening to discover what’s going on in this small-town with characters who pretend to be one thing, but turn out to be something else entirely. If I had known this was Book Two of a series, I might have started with Book One; however, it read perfectly as a stand-alone novel. I highly recommend this book to all fans of murder mysteries and thrillers, and hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

I’d like to thank NetGalley, Samantha Jayne Allen, and Minotaur Books for the opportunity to read and review this ARC.

Second in the Annie McIntyre series. I've read and enjoyed both and found Annie to be an utterly original character. She's young, slight and not at your stereotypical private eye. The sense of place makes Texas one of the more prominent characters in the book. As the book opens, a hard rain after a drought turns into a destructive flood with a number of lives lost. Bethany, a high school friend of Annie's, hires her to find the man who saved her life in the flood. Well done mystery that keeps you guessing.

I have enjoyed this series and this installment was very good. I liked the plot and thought that the flood made it explosive.
Many thanks to St. Martin’s Press and to NetGalley for providing a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

Starts off a little slow, but the second half picks up in intensity and excitement. And he is working towards becoming a PI for her uncle Leroy and Mary Pat. She is given her first solo case to find a missing person, and it turns out he is connected to a bigger story than she could have imagined.

April 21, 2023
Book Review
Hard Rain
Samantha Jayne Allen
reviewed by Lou Jacobs


readersremains.com | Goodreads


“Hard Rain” is the author’s follow-up to her Tony Hillerman Prize-winning debut book, “Pay Dirt Road.” It provides another mesmerizing chapter in the growth and self-actualization of 25-year-old Annie McIntyre.

Although this is the second installment, it can certainly be devoured and enjoyed as a standalone, as Allen flawlessly supplies the necessary backstory. Fresh out of college, Annie returns to her small hometown of Garnett, Texas, anticipating only a short stay. She does not know where her fortune and future path will lead her. Unexpectedly, her grandfather LeRoy offers her a job in the family firm of McIntyre Investigation as a sort of apprenticeship. The firm is only comprised of elderly LeRoy, on the verge of retirement, and Mary-Pat Zimmerman, his former partner in the sheriff’s office. Annie intends on qualifying for her own license.

The reader is thrown immediately into the tumultuous action. The Geronimo River has crested to record levels of forty feet, and a flood warning alarm goes off on the cellphone of Bethany Richter, proclaiming a record-inducing flash flood. She finds herself on the second floor of a rented cabin. Her husband, preacher John-David, was called away on duty the night before, and her close friends Kendall and Michael are asleep on the first floor. She ventures out onto the balcony, only to be swept into the raging river. She finds herself clinging to a tree branch. She is rescued by a man who is also caught in the swift current, only for him subsequently to be swept away in the torturous current of the river gone mad. Her friends’ bodies are recovered several days later. This flood of biblical proportions caused devastation and chaos to the small, close-knit community. Suffering from shock and survival guilt, Bethany must have peace of mind and find out the identity of her savior. Is he still alive? She must thank him or his surviving family.

Bethany approaches her longtime friend Annie for answers. This will be Annie’s first solo investigation case. She describes her savior as looking sort-of-like a “blue-eyed Jesus.” She recalls him wearing a red t-shirt, proclaiming in large letters: “PAWS Garnett Fundraiser 5K Run” (a local animal shelter), and on one of his forearms, a tattoo of a blue rose.

Annie embarks on a tortuous investigation that meanders through an unexpected underbelly of crime, drug dealing, and abuse, resulting in surprising levels of danger and intrigue. Implications of the local church and its leaders raise concern about their true purpose and motivations. She begins to suspect her missing person may be more of a murderer than a savior.

Samantha Jayne Allen provides a slow-burn small-town mystery with escalating tension and intrigue that is atmospheric and expertly plotted, and crescendos into an unexpected and satisfying denouement. And yet, the reader is left yearning for further insight and travails of Annie McIntyre along her path of self-actualization.

Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press / Minotaur Books for providing an Uncorrected Proof in exchange for an honest review.

Samantha Jayne Allen's Annie McIntyre series gets better and better as it matures and we learn more about Annie. I love the complexity not only of the cases that Annie works on in her role as a beginning investigator, but also the complexity of the relationships between the characters. The small town Texas setting is the perfect place for the secrets that the characters are keeping and the crimes they commit, and I can already tell by the foreshadowing in the last chapters of Hard Rain that book three is going to be just as good!

This is the second book in the series that I have read. As with the first one, it was very enjoyable. I enjoyed the characters interactions, enjoyed the mystery and suspense, and I can’t wait to read more about Annie, her grandfather Leroy, Mary Pat, and the rest of the gang.


I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley. This is my honest and voluntary review.

The second in the series, Hard Rain continues Annie's story and the private investigation firm she works with family. A harsh storm brings flood waters to the community, destroying homes and life. Annie's friend seeks her out to help find a man who saved her life before he was sweep away in the waters. What she uncovers is shady and corrupt dealings with a local church.

Annie grows into the role of PI, but she still portrays herself much younger than her true age.. She's indecisive, weak and an unlikable heroine. There are a lot of characters in this story to track, which prevented the depth this type of story needs to be interesting.

Thank you Minotaur Books for the complimentary copy.

This series is quickly becoming one of my favorites. Annie McIntyre is back, still figuring out life and working for her family’s private investigation firm. A flood has just occurred in town, and she is hired to find a missing person. Mystery and intrigue ensue. These books are so well written, and the slow burn in this series really works for me where it doesn’t in other novels. The descriptive nature of the story really makes you feel as though you are in Garnett Texas with Annie.
I am really looking forward to where this series will go!
Thank you to Netgalley and Minotaur for the opportunity to read this in exchange for my honest opinion.

Annie McIntyre is now six months into being a private investigator and thinking about applying for her PI license. She takes on the case of her acquaintance Bethany, who was caught up in a flash flood but was saved by an unknown man who she's asked Annie to find. Annie is still settling into the PI role, but as she makes headway into the case, it suddenly becomes more complicated when it leads her to stumble across a dead body. Now it appears that Bethany's savior might be involved with drugs and may not be the hero she thinks he is. Overall, a solid mystery but Annie's internal monologue and hesitancy can be a bit repetitive at times. While this book is the second in the series, it can be read as a standalone.

I really wanted to like Hard Rain as the description is along the lines of books I enjoy. However, I really struggled with it. At times it felt like the author was trying for an intense thriller and at others, a cozy mystery, While some authors do this well, I found the genre-identity confusion distracting in this case. Further, while there was some effective character development, certain key aspects of important people and their motivation were unrealistic and/or underdeveloped. These factors made it hard to fully immerse myself into the story.

Thank you to Minotaur Books, Netgalley, and the author for early access to the digital version of this book