Delpha Wade and Tom Phelan Mystery Series

Book 1

Winner of the 2015 Dashiell Hammett Prize and 2016 Shamus Award 1959. Delpha Wade killed a man who was raping her. Wanted to kill the other one too, but he got away. Now, after fourteen years in prison, she's out. It's 1973, and nobody's rushing to hire a parolee. Persistence and smarts land her a secretarial job with Tom Phelan, an ex-roughneck turned neophyte private eye. Together these two pry into the dark corners of Beaumont, a blue-collar, Cajun-influenced town dominated by Big Oil. A mysterious client plots mayhem against a small petrochemical company-why? Searching for a teenage boy, Phelan uncovers the weird lair of a serial killer. And Delpha -- on a weekend outing -- looks into the eyes of her rapist, the one who got away. The novel's conclusion is classic noir, full of surprise, excitement, and karmic justice. Sandlin's elegant prose, twisting through the dark thickets of human passion, allows Delpha to open her heart again to friendship, compassion, and sexuality. Lisa Sandlin's story "Phelan's First Case" was anthologized in Lone Star Noir and was later re-anthologized in Akashic's Best of the Noir series, USA Noir. The Do-Right is her first full-length mystery.
Lisa was born in Beaumont, currently lives and teaches in Omaha, Nebraska, and summers in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Book 2

The Bird Boys

by Lisa Sandlin

Published 16 July 2019

NOMINEE-EDGAR AWARDS "BEST ORIGINAL PAPERBACK"
Best Crime Novels of the Year, New York Times
Reading the West Award Nominee
Starred review from Publishers Weekly
Starred review from Kirkus Reviews
Starred review from Booklist
Most Anticipated Crime Books of 2019, CrimeReads

The new novel from award-winning author Lisa Sandlin catches up with the almost-murdered secretary Delpha Wade (The Do-Right, 2015, set in 1973) as she's released from a hospital in order to be tucked into the back seat of a police cruiser. Her boss, P. I. Tom Phelan, sets out to spring her. He needs her back in his investigation business, where he'll soon be chasing a skulking grand larcenist and plotting how to keep a ganjapreneur out of the grabby hands of a brand new agency, the D.E.A. Delpha digs through old records and knocks on strange doors to unravel the dangerous case of two brothers with beaucoup aliases-verifying that sometimes truth is not true, but murder is always murder.