Jeff Salamon

Adapted from Boomtown: The True Story of the Wickedest Town in Texas by Joe Pappalardo, by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Frequent Texas Monthly contributor Joe Pappalardo’s rollicking new book, Boomtown: The True Story of the Wickedest Town in Texas (St. Martin’s Press), uncovers the story of Borger, a small settlement in the northern stretches of the Panhandle that was renowned during the 1920s as a den of gambling, bootlegging, prostitution, and random violence.

If you lived in Dallas in the eighties, as I did, Mary Kay Ash, founder of the eponymous Mary Kay cosmetics company, seemed to be everywhere all at once, promoting her business and herself. Ash telegraphed the kind of show-offy wealth that was so often a staple of Dallas—the city and the then-popular TV show.

Adam Sternbergh’s third novel, The Blinds (HarperCollins/Ecco, August 1), is something of a mash-up: a revisionist western adorned with futuristic neuroscience and tricked out with some Lost-style puzzles (all of which, rest assured, are solved by the book’s end). Set in an unidentified stretch of West Texas, this gripping thriller follows the goings-on at Caesura, a fenced-off compound that houses a few dozen participants in a federal witness protection program.