Hell to Pay: A Texas Private Investigator Mystery - Paperback

by Denise Diana Huddle (Author)

For PI Iris Raines, tracking down a missing witness should have been routine. Instead, bullets fly, blood spills, and an explosion tears through her family's law office, leaving two people dead in the rubble.

Suddenly, Iris isn't just chasing a witness-she's chasing the truth behind a firestorm that threatens to leave her family in financial ruin and destroy everything she holds dear.

But the bodies piling up aren't random, and the trail doesn't end with the flames. Iris finds herself unraveling a conspiracy of blackmail, corruption, and murder that no one else dares to connect.

The cops don't believe her, the criminals want her gone, and the powerful players in the middle will do whatever it takes to shut her up.

Too bad for them-Iris doesn't scare easy. She's sharp-tongued, stubborn, and-push come to shove-more than willing to bend a few rules to get to the truth. She may be standing alone against a gang of pit-viper lawyers and their crooked clients, a den of government corruption, and a faceless killer who knows way too much about her, but she's not backing down.

Because for Iris Raines, the only thing worse than dying is letting the bad guys get away with it.

Fast, darkly funny, and impossible to put down, Hell to Pay is the first book in the Iris Raines Mystery series-perfect for readers who love razor-edged heroines, twisty investigations, and a story that doesn't flinch when the bullets start flying.

Fans of Kinsey Millhone, V.I. Warshawski, and Elvis Cole will find a new favorite in Iris Raines.

Start reading Hell to Pay today!

Prologue
I should have stuck with finding dead people. I'm really good at that. I always find them-dead people, I mean. They're buried someplace, and they never move. No change-of-address cards, no aliases...just dead guys in boxes. You find the dead guy, you find his heirs, you give them their money, you get paid. Everybody's happy. Instead, it's after two in the morning, and I'm pulling out of the parking lot of our temporary offices. I've spent a long night, preceded by a long day, tracking down a witness who went missing the day before trial. I look across the street at the office building where the Raines family has practiced law for fifty years and where my fathers raised me...just in time to see it explode.