What James Ellroy did for L.A., Michael Simon now does for Austin, Texas, in the first of a series of ferociously paced crime novels. The time is the oil-bust year of 1988. The detective is Dan Reles, a New York–born Jew marooned among good ol’ boys and unhinged by the violent death of his partner. His career depends on solving the case of a murdered prostitute whose body is arriving in grisly installments at inconvenient locations. But as he tries to find out who killed “Dirty Sally,” Reles starts crossing the lines between his town’s crack-ridden ghettos and the watering holes of its moneyed elite. Unerring in its sense of place, propulsively written, Dirty Sally announces a major new talent.