The Mansions on Woodlawn Boulevard, by Gary A. Keith

“The Mansions on Woodlawn Boulevard, much like Austin Blues, is gripping and atmospheric, a novel for everyone who wants to understand the city before it got so famously ‘weird.'”
– David Wright Faladé

A veritable Potemkin village on an elite Austin boulevard—glorious old mansions, folk Victorians, and bungalows—hides a whitewashed history, from the freedmen days of nearby Clarksville to today’s gentrification of that very neighborhood.

An Austin-based writer from the past—O. Henry—puts today’s elite mansioneers on edge when his long-buried writings expose the sordid events of a capital city built on the soil of freedmen. Most residents don’t care about that history, but it soon blows up into a major fight at the Texas legislature, where powerbrokers work to keep resources flowing to the elite and land titles tightly in the grasp of today’s mansioneers.

Readers of Gary Keith’s Austin Blues will enjoy returning to the exploits of Sandy and Dude, here joined by colorful characters Clarence, Jeremy, Billye, and Mandy, curious researchers whose persistent digging brings old maps and a soot-covered story from O. Henry to the doorsteps of the agitated mansioneers. The dual timelines reveal a mystery showing once again that Faulkner was right—the past is never really dead.