So You Want to Get Betrayal In Dallas by Mark North
Betrayal In Dallas by Mark North is a crime thriller set in Texas. It's a straightforward genre read — not literary fiction, not a bestseller that everyone has analyzed to death. You want it, you grab it, you read it. Here's how people actually go about finding and getting a copy. The most common route is just ordering it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Amazon carries the Kindle edition and the paperback if the title is in print. Sometimes indie titles like this cycle in and out of print, so availability isn't guaranteed at any given moment. I ran into this myself once when I was trying to track down a specific edition for a friend — the Kindle version existed but the paperback was listed as "temporarily out of stock" for three months straight. What worked was going to BookFinder.com, typing in the ISBN, and comparing offers across used sellers. I found a decent condition paperback for under ten dollars shipped within a week. If you're dead set on physical copies and want it cheap, your local library might have it. The Dallas Public Library system tends to pick up regional Texas authors. If they don't carry it, do an interlibrary loan request — it takes about ten to fourteen days but it's free.
What the Book Is Actually About
Mark North writes crime fiction and suspense. Betrayal In Dallas follows the kind of plot you'd expect from the genre: a protagonist in Dallas gets pulled into a situation involving betrayal, danger, and moral compromise. The setting matters because Dallas functions almost as another character — the sprawl, the power dynamics, the particular texture of Texas culture all feed into the narrative. It's not subtle about it, which is neither a virtue nor a vice. North's style is functional. The prose gets the job done without drawing attention to itself. Some readers find that satisfying; others find it flat. I've seen both takes in book club discussions and online threads. My own take is that it's fine for a long weekend read. You won't remember every line a year later, but you'll finish it and feel like the time wasn't wasted.
Pitfalls People Run Into
There are a couple of things to watch for. First, make sure you're getting the right author. There are multiple writers named Mark North in different genres. If you search the title on a bookseller site and see unrelated results, check the author's biography and other titles listed. I made this mistake early on and ordered a completely different book before realizing the author I wanted had written under a slightly different pen name for earlier works. Second, pricing on paperback copies of out-of-print titles can be absurd. On the used market, some sellers list a common trade paperback for forty or fifty dollars. Don't fall for it. Set a price alert on BookFinder or use the "Watch This Item" feature on eBay and check back weekly. Prices on these drop significantly after a few months of listing. Third, if you're looking for an audiobook version, it may not exist yet. North hasn't been prolific about narrated editions, and sometimes titles get produced as audio only after the initial print run stabilizes. I checked Audible and Libro.fm directly — nothing at the time of writing. If you need audio, you might have to wait or stick to text.
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Reading It
If you go the Kindle route, the formatting is standard ebook quality. Nothing fancy, no special typesetting issues I noticed. Pages transfer fine between devices. If you go paperback, check the page count against reviews — some listings list incorrect pagination, usually because they're pulling metadata from the wrong edition. The book runs at a pace that most thriller readers will find comfortable. It doesn't drag, though certain middle sections could have been tighter by maybe thirty pages. That's normal for this tier of genre fiction and not worth losing sleep over.
Is It Worth Your Time
If you like Dallas-set crime fiction and don't mind unpretentious prose, yes. If you're looking for something innovative or deeply layered, you might want to branch out to authors like Michael Connelly or Dale Brown for the Texas crime angle, or read something more character-driven if that's what you actually want. But for what it is — a solid, no-frills crime thriller — it delivers on its promise. The most practical takeaway is just to verify the ISBN before buying, check the used-book markets instead of paying full price, and know that the audiobook probably isn't an option right now. Everything else is straightforward.
