The author can write a great sentence, but she isn’t so great at writing a full length book. This is like 5 short stories all blended together hoping that the result is a cohesive book. Unfortunately it isn’t.
There is too much jumping around and too many aspects of the story that don’t really matter. I will try the second book in the series and see if this rough writing gets smoother ( )

Lisa Sandlin has hit a homerun with her debut, The Do-Right, a full-length novel based on her short-story, “Phelan’s First Case.” Tom Phelan is a brand new PI working in a Texas port city during the Watergate era of the 1970’s who hires a recently released female parolee named Delpha Wade to work as his assistant. Tom is a Vietnam veteran who a hangs out his shingle as a private detective after losing a finger in an oil rig accident. He does a favor for a probation officer friend by hiring Delpha, recently released from a women’s correctional facility after serving fourteen years for killing one of the two men who raped her. Both Tom and Delpha are narrators of this tale in which a variety of unusual cases (and characters) cross their doorstep, including a betrayed wife (or is she?), a missing prosthetic leg, an inheritance mystery, and an ultimately satisfying resolution to Delpha’s tragic history. Sandlin does a great job of gradually weaving the history of her protagonists’ lives throughout the story and how those histories affect their cases. The author, a Beaumont, Texas native, has an ear for southern dialogue, especially in the uneducated Delpha – but Delpha’s lack of education is not indicative of her intelligence or her street smarts, the latter honed by her years in prison. Here’s hoping we’ll see more of Tom, Delpha and new cases for Phelan Investigations! (Warning: some fairly graphic intimacy is described in parts of the novel). ( )

On the surface a rambling, entertaining mystery, this book likes to show, not tell, the interior lives of its main characters. Instead of using flashbacks, we see how ex-con Delpha has been dreaming for her 14 years in prison of having a room of her own (with walls and a door that SHE closes and locks). A normal conversation seems unreal to her. Her eventual boss, a newly-minted private detective, has his own past he doesn't dwell on and doesn't appreciate being asked about. I had to laugh when he thought things were going to be so easy at first. There are other interesting people in the book, relatives and neighbors and clients. The setting is Texas bayou country with sensuality, some humor ... and violence. The mystery elements of the book involve drug dealers, corporate skullduggery, and family members with grudges. The author has a way with words, blunt where needed and still simple but lyrical in other places. ( )

Some books are almost like time machines. They so vividly portray a time and a place from the reader’s past that reading them is almost like being there again. For me, Lisa Sandlin’s The Do-Right is one of those books. Set in 1973, in Beaumont, Texas, The Do-Right is the story of a young woman who returns to Beaumont after serving fourteen years in Gatesville prison for killing one of the two men who raped her. Now, if she wants to avoid going back to prison, her parole officer tells her that she needs to get a job – and quickly.

Luckily for Delpha Wade, Beaumont is not nearly as large a town as it appears to be at first glance and Joe Ford, her parole officer, has a favor or two he is willing to call in on her behalf. One of those owing Ford a favor is Tom Phelan a young man with a brand new detective agency and no one to handle all the phone calls he hopes will soon start rolling in. After he very reluctantly agrees to interview her, and the take-charge Delpha gets an unscheduled chance to demonstrate her office skills, Tom knows that she is exactly what he needs manning his front office. As he remarks to Delpha, “Miss Wade, you were hired when you called me Bubba.”

And the phone does start ringing. For starters, a mother is looking for her missing high school student son, a woman wants pictures of her husband with his mistress, and someone’s sister has stolen his prosthetic leg and refuses to give it back. It all seems fairly routine and promising for the new agency until some of the cases begin to overlap, and Tom learns the hard way just how important Delpha Wade is to his agency – and to him personally.

Lisa Sandlin presents 1973 Beaumont so much in the classic noir tradition that, despite numerous references to events of the day such as Nixon’s Watergate scandal and Hank Aaron’s pursuit of Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record, it is just as easy to envision a city of the late 1940s as it is one of the 1970s. I, in fact, first read a segment of The Do-Right published in 2014 as “Phelan’s First Case,” one of the short stories featured in Lone Star Noir, a fine collection of noir short stories set in Texas.

The best thing about The Do-Right, however, and what makes it so much more effective than its short story cousin, is how deeply, in comparison to the short story Sandlin develops the Delpha Wade character in the novel. Delpha is a complex character, a woman who was determined to fight to the death the father and son who raped her despite the price she had to pay for doing so. Now, after serving her prison sentence, she is determined to make something of the rest of her life - and she plans to help put away as many bad guys along the way as she can.


Delpha Wade and Tom Phelan make a great team, and here's hoping that Lisa Sandlin has more in store for them in the future. ( )

Fiction
Lisa Sandlin
The Do-Right
Cinco Puntos Press
Paperback, 978-1-941026-19-9 (also available as ebook), 306 pgs., $16.95
October 13, 2015


The Do-Right (an old Southern term for prison) is Lisa Sandlin’s first mystery novel. Set in Beaumont, Texas, in 1973, it joins the growing subgenre of Gulf Coast Noir. Delpha Wade, returning to Beaumont after fourteen years in the women’s prison at Gatesville for killing one of the men who raped her on a dance-hall floor, needs a job as a condition of parole. Tom Phelan is a Vietnam veteran opening his practice as a private investigator. Wade has a business course certificate from Gatesville. Phelan needs a secretary and takes a chance on Wade. Together they ferret out unfaithful husbands, missing persons, industrial espionage, and a serial killer. The Do-Right is a satisfying and entertaining contribution to classic noir.

The quick-witted, determined Delpha Wade is a sympathetic character who uses improve skills and hard-won knowledge of human nature (“You can learn to lose curiosity”) gleaned on the inside to adjust to life on the outside. It is a pleasure to watch her slowly unfurling, like a time-lapse of a flower opening to the sun. “Delpha had promised herself patience. Get used to all the clear air around her, the streets stretching out, doors that open open open. Couldn’t come all at once. Come slow. She’d have to get used to wearing sky over her head.” Tom Phelan is a likeable guy learning to be a private investigator who turns out to be like a terrier with a bone when two and two don’t make four. “This case was dead as a crab in crude, but it wouldn’t stop skittering sideways.”

The historical detail brings 1973 alive. The Watergate hearings are on TV, Hank Aaron is chasing the Babe’s home-run record, eight-track tapes and men sporting Burt Reynolds sideburns abound. You can feel Beaumont as well with its Cajun culture, sulfur smell of petrochemicals, and subtropical humidity.

Sandlin writes in the noir tradition (“Phelan stepped over the threshold into a curtain of bourbon fume and iron and silence”), colloquially, with simple but precise language, in fragments and dropped conjunctions. “Phelan asked for Georgia and found her, said he wanted to talk.” You can hear Bogie, can’t you? Wade, exasperated with Phelan: “You need to know something I learned from my past, ask me straight out. I’ll tell you. Just don’t act like my slip is showing.”

The Do-Right is funny, too. “Putting the paper away, he [Phelan] wondered how she felt about her boy Nixon now that he’d acquired his own special prosecutor. Phelan had had one of those in third grade, until he cracked the fifth-grader’s head with a Davy Crockett lunch box. Maybe Nixon’d try that.” And cases that require such sentences as, “Why would your brother and sister want your artificial leg?”

As the narrative moves between Wade and Phelan, Sandlin creates a trail of expertly-dropped clues. As she begins braiding storylines (“It’s just … there’s kinda a collision of circumstances happening here.”) into a surprising, elegant conclusion, history attempts to repeat itself and Beaumont proves to be smaller than it looks. You could call it Beaumont Confidential.

Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life. ( )