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A Delpha Wade and Tom Phelan Mystery
by Lisa Sandlin
After a serial killer almost murdered Delpha Wade (The Do-Right, 2015), the county hospital releases her into the handcuffs of the city police for questioning.
She killed the man who was trying to kill her, and she is, after all, an ex-con. It's still Beaumont, 1970s, and mindsets don't change along the Texas Gulf Coast. Her boss, the neophyte private detective Tom Phelan, awaits her, and soon they are once again in deep shit. It seems like an easy case--one Bird brother looking for the long-lost other--but turns out that one brother is a murderer. He likes to slit throats. But which one? Maybe the young girl who sees into the dark places of human hearts can help. But only Delpha is wise enough to listen.
Paperback Original
"[W]hat makes this crime novel soar is the humanity and humility of its main characters. It is by turns exciting, tender, suspenseful, observant, and gently funny. Readers will eagerly await the next installment." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"What sounds like an ordinary PI caper, though, becomes something elevated, poignant, and complex in this beautifully written novel…Sandlin has crafted an outstanding series that readers will want to follow and savor." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Like her award-winning debut, The Do-Right (2015), also starring Delpha Wade, Sandlin's sequel soars on the wings of its its spot-on evocation of a time and place and its utterly compelling central characters, Delpha and Tom, as their mutual respect and trust grows along with a dash of sexual tension. A first-rate series crying for word-of-mouth support…" - Booklist (starred review)
"In Sandlin's second to feature her ex-con-turned-private-eye Delpha and her sympathetic boss Phelan, the two take on a case involving blood, brothers, and Beaumont's darkest secrets. The Texan on staff is confident in saying that Lisa Sandlin's series is the best thing to ever come out of Beaumont." - CrimeReads (Most Anticipated Crime Books of 2019)
This information about The Bird Boys was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lisa Sandlin was born in the Gulf Coast oil town of Beaumont, Texas, and lived there before and after a transfer sent her family to Naples, Italy, for three years. She graduated from Rice University in Houston and then lived many years in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Once she had earned an M.F.A. in Writing at Vermont College, Sandlin packed a small car and headed for Nebraska in January. She taught at Wayne State College 1997-2009, with semester leaves to teach at The University of Texas and Kadir Has University in Istanbul, Turkey. Sandlin's fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, Southwest Review, Crazy Horse, StoryQuarterly, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere and her nonfiction in the New York Times Book Review and in anthologies. Her books are The Famous Thing About Death (1991); Message to the Nurse of Dreams (1997), winner of the Violet Crown Award from the Austin Writers League and the Jesse H. Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters; In the River Province (2004), a finalist for the Jones award; and You Who Make the Sky Bend, a collaboration with New Mexican retablo artist Catherine Ferguson. Sandlin also served as a co-editor of Times of Sorrow, Times of Grace (2002) from Omaha's own Backwaters Press. She has received an NEA Fellowship, a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize, and she teaches at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
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