Shifty's Boys - Chris Offutt

 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...

The Revelators - Ace Atkins

 The Revelators is the continuation of The Shameless, which I read and reviewed here a month or so ago.  Quinn Colson is still recovering from being shot down at the end of The Shameless.  He has been 'temporarily' replaced as Sheriff of Tibbehah County while investigations continue into who ordered the hit.  Meanwhile J K Vardaman has been elected governor despite or maybe on account of his close association with the Watchmen militia.  The Watchmen are rearming and looking for contacts; fortunately Donnie Varner, schoolfriend of Quinn Colson and Boom Kimbaugh, and teenage crush of Quinn's sister Caddy, is fresh out of jail and looking for work.  Fannie Hathcock is expanding her sex and smuggling empire, seeking to expand her standing with the Syndicate, and itching for revenge of the frame hammer type on those who ordered the hit on her lover.  In the deep background federal agencies are quietly trying to get on top of the various criminal and seditious enterprises that currently control the town of Jericho and surrounding Tibbehah County.

It's another utterly engrossing narrative with dozens of beautifully drawn three-dimensional characters, all of them with good and bad sides.  The inciting incident is when Vardaman has the immigrant workforce at the local chicken factory rounded up.  The adults are incarcerated, the kids left to fend for themselves.  Naturally the kids are taken in at Caddy Colson's Christian refuge.  The chicken factory is restaffed with inmates from the local for-profit prison.  Not all the local Good Old Boys approve.  Not all the local wheelers and dealers are in on the action.  

I relished every minute of The Revelators.  I cannot fathom why this series isn't higher profile.

The Shameless - Ace Atkins

Before finding The Shameless, all I knew of Ace Atkins was that he had been chosen to continue the Spenser novels of the late Robert B Parker.  Now it turns out that Atkins has written a whole bunch of novels in his own right, including a hatful of True Crime Novels which seem right up my street.

The Shameless is the ninth in his Quinn Colson series.  It matters not at all that I hadn't read the previous eight - Atkins has used the ingenious device of a couple of podcasters from New York who come to Tibbehah County, Mississippi, to investigate a young man's mysterious death thirty years earlier, who inevitably unearth Colson's back-story.  Colson was at school with the late Brandon Taylor; both were avid hunters given to disappearing into the woods.  Quinn Colson famously came back, poor old Brandon didn't.  Eventually the local sheriff found him with his brains blown out.  Suicide, the sheriff decided.  The sheriff back then was Quinn Colson's uncle.  He, too, shot himself twenty years later.

Back in 1990 Quinn Colson and his best friend Boom were teenage tearaways.  Then they joined the military, became rangers, served in Afghanistan and became heroes.  Boom came home missing an arm.  Quinn returned to become sheriff.  Now he is married to Maggie who, back in the day, just happened to be Brandon Taylor's girlfriend.  When he married Maggie, Quinn also took on her son from her previous marriage - who, of course, is called Brandon.

While the podcasters did into the past, Quinn Colson has more than enough trouble to deal with in the present day.  Senator Jimmy Vardaman is running for the governorship.  Vardaman is a huckster, claiming to be against the corrupt political system, promising to bring traditional values back to Mississippi.  Obviously he is corrupt as hell, riding on criminal money instead of the traditional vested interests.  Quinn Colson doesn't care a damn for Vardaman or his personal militia; he is after the Syndicate who control him.

It's a dense and dangerous system in which it's well night impossible to tell the bad guys from the good.  It gets even more complicated when an anonymous letter to Maggie Colson leads to Quinn finding the remains of a young woman, not far from where Brandon Taylor was found, dating back to the same time he died.

I loved the deep back-story to The Shameless.  I really enjoyed Atkins' writing style - sharp, intelligent, but retaining a flavour of William Faulkner and other chroniclers of the Deep South.  I've got some serious catching up to do with Mr Atkins.