There's a genre emerging of American bluegrass communities colliding head-on with large-scale contemporary corruption. I have previously blogged about Ace Atkins' work in this field. Now we have Chris Offutt's series featuring Army CID officer Mick Hardin, of which Shifty's Boys is Book 2.
Hardin is back in his old Kentucky home recovering from IED injuries and lodging with his sister Linda, the county sheriff, currently up for re-election. Somebody murders and dumps Barney Kissick, no great loss, the local drug-dealer so low on the scale of social responsibility that he's known far and wide as Fuckin' Barney. Mick, though, knew Barney in childhood, so feels obliged to offer his condolences to the family matriarch, the titular Shifty. She asks him to find out who killed her son. Then she loses a second son, a harmless idiot who never hurt anyone. And someone torches the cabin Mick inherited from his Pawpaw, incinerating the geek who fixing up the Hardin family truck. That's simply going too far. Mick teams up with Shifty's eldest boy, Ray, a Special Ops Marine, and takes on the people with secrets to hide.
It might be predictable but it's great fun and very well written. Offutt is notably good and adding extra dimensions to his characters. There's an especially effective scene when Mick delivers the long-delayed divorce papers to his ex. And Ray is humanised from being just another killing machine by the fact that he is gay, a secret he thought he'd hidden from his mother Shifty, but...
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