Locations

The first Eve Twist book, Barrio Sonata, takes place in the area south of Congress Street known as Barrio Viejo, the Old Neighborhood. Originally part of Mexico, Barrio Viejo is home to the largest collection of Mexican-style 19th-century Sonoran Row houses in the U.S. Until 1968, Tucson’s residential restrictions did not allow people of Asian or African descent to live within certain city neighborhoods. For over 100 years Barrio Viejo was the heart of early Tucson’s social, economic, and cultural life.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the center of that Barrio neighborhood was bulldozed to make way for federally funded urban redevelopment. The Tucson Convention Center was erected on top of the ruins of the historic Mexican downtown area and effectively split the Barrio in half at Congress Street. Barrio Viejo is to the south and El Presidio is to the north. Designation of Barrio Viejo as a National Historic Landmark is forthcoming.

To find clues to who buried a body on South Meyer Avenue in the Old Barrio, Detective Eve Twist must confront the urban redevelopment and devastation that enveloped 1960s Tucson.

Book 2 in the cold case mystery series, Broadway Modern, takes place along the Broadway Boulevard strip known as the Sunshine Mile, two miles of roadway from Euclid Avenue to Country Club Road. Broadway Boulevard was developed during the post-World War II economic boom that energized the nation and promoted the suburban American Dream. The Broadway traffic artery became an important east/west corridor leading to and from downtown, and home to many of Tucson’s most important mid-century modern buildings.

As the shopping district emerged along Broadway, new stores offered the products of the 1950s and 60s—furniture, lighting, photographic equipment, shoes, clothes, and cars. Architecturally modern structures, built along its edge to support new neighborhoods, staged a world of glass storefronts, curved concrete, geometric designs, and iconic signage that advertised Tucson as a modern metropolis. Broadway’s Sunshine Mile was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on May 26, 2020.  

Detective Eve Twist must wade into the drama surrounding the Broadway expansion and the preservation of the historic modernist architecture to solve the puzzle of the murder of a young architecture professor.

John Spring, west of the University of Arizona, is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Tucson. Since the 1980s it has been known as Dunbar/Spring and provides the setting for book 3, Dunbar Blues. The Dunbar Historic District holds a rich history and cultural significance for the city’s African-American community. From 1913 to 1951, nearly every black student in Tucson attended the Dunbar School, the city’s separate school for black students in grades K-9. Most of the houses in Dunbar/Spring were built between the early 1920s and the 1950s, and the area suffered economic decline after 1945 with the rapid expansion of suburban development and subsequent urban decline.

From 1875 to 1909 the Court Street Cemetery, where several thousand people were buried, occupied almost half of the area. When the cemetery was closed in 1909, many of the human remains were relocated to nearby cemeteries to make room for residential development. But many more graves were not removed, and evidence of the graves left behind occasionally resurfaces. The Dunbar Historic District was officially designated by the City of Tucson in 1994 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Two burials are unearthed on land at the edge of the old cemetery and Detective Eve Twist gets drawn into Tucson’s racially segregated past as she investigates how the bodies ended up buried in Dunbar/Spring.