• The Sinners, by Ace Atkins (Putnam):
As if continuing the adventures of Robert B. Parker’s Boston private eye, Spenser, weren’t sufficiently time-consuming, author Ace Atkins also pens a series about Quinn Colson, a former U.S. Army Ranger and current sheriff of Mississippi’s (fictional) Tibbehah County. One hell of a series it is, too. The Sinners, the eighth Colson novel, really hits it out of the park. Colson may have finally put his nemesis, corrupt businessman
Johnny Stagg, behind bars some while back, but crime abhors a vacuum, and Stagg has since been replaced by one Fannie Hathcock, a red-headed strip-club proprietor we got to know in Atkins’ previous installment in this series, The Fallen (2017). In The Sinners, Hatchcock’s able bartender, Ordeen Davis, is murdered by Heath Pritchard, an old-school marijuana grower who likes “racin’, growin’ weed, drinking and screwin”—not necessarily in that order. Hamp Beckett, Colson’s deceased uncle and law-enforcement predecessor, consigned Pritchard to their state’s notorious Parchman prison 23 years ago, but now he’s returned—and he wants what he figures is his share of the family pot business still being carried on by his not-too-bright nephews, stock-car neophytes (and comic-relief providers) Tyler and Cody Pritchard. As one might expect, Hathcock is upset at Davis’ death, especially since it comes on top of other trouble she’s already been having with the Pritchard boys and moves her closer into conflict with the Dixie Mafia. Meanwhile, Boom Kimbrough—Colson’s wingman, fellow vet, and the designated best man at the sheriff’s impending nuptials—has gone to work for a trucking enterprise that’s also caught up in the drug trade, and a determined federal agent wants Kimbrough to don a wire and help her bring down his employer. As they might be in real life, the obstacles thrown in Colson’s way here are reconciled in a bittersweet manner that lends this book the resonance of reality.• Swift Vengeance, by T. Jefferson Parker (Putnam):
Californian Jeff Parker boasts of an elegant prose style, and there are few other fiction writers who can come anywhere near to achieving his concision and beauty of expression. Parker also claims a firm grasp on the development of plot and characters, with 24 novels to his credit as proof. Saying much with little causes readers to want more—and Parker is happy to deliver. In this second tale starring Roland Ford (introduced in last year’s The Room of White Fire), this San Diego cop turned Marine turned private investigator endeavors to help Lindsey Rakes, a stressed-out ex-U.S. Air Force drone pilot, who has received the most gruesome death threats from a mysterious figured identified only as “Caliphornia.” It seems that would-be assassin intends to exact revenge upon Rakes for the deaths she caused in the Middle East during her military service. The handwriting on the menacing notes resembles that of Rasha Samara, a Saudi landscape architect she’s dated during her divorce from husband Brandon Goff. But the angry Goff might just as well be the source of the threats. Rakes goes into hiding for her own protection, while Ford works with an FBI specialist to identify her would-be assailant. The beheading of one of Rakes’ former Air Force colleagues, who had also been terrorized by Caliphornia, raises the stakes all around. While tackling international issues and the violence that
may derive from them with confidence and prowess, Parker brings enough verisimilitude to his escapist fiction, that one can’t help feeling both thrilled by his storytelling … and on constant alert for dangers ahead.• Pirata, by Patrick Hasburgh
(Harper Perennial):
A crew of louche ex-patriots killing time and abundant brain cells on a Central American beach find themselves in a most un-mellow situation; yet despite the violence, debauchery, and broken families, this book makes the life of a surf bum seem rather attractive. “Part of the deal with expats in Mexico is that we get to be whoever we want to be—as long as we don’t cause too much trouble,” opines Nick Lutz, a California used-car salesman turned slacker. After being shot in the head by a would-be client determined to hijack some wheels, then seeing his young son injured in an automobile accident and losing his wife, Lutz flees south of the border in hopes of finding a new life. It’s all good—until a pretty femme fatale named Meagan dumps her abusive boyfriend, Winsor, who also happens to be Nick’s drinking buddy. When she seeks refuge for herself and her two boys in Nick’s casita, Winsor doesn’t take too kindly to the disruption of his love life. Not too kindly at all. Suddenly dead bodies begin to appear, together with a distinctly unfriendly FBI agent; and in short order Lutz must fight for the few things that are genuinely important to him. Amid everything else, he realizes that his ex-wife back in the States, who now has custody of their child, may have had a hand in his attempted murder. Hasburgh created the 1987-1991 Fox-TV series 21 Jump Street, so it’s little wonder that Pirata moves quickly and credibly, tempting one to chuck it all and head to a beach with a board and suntan lotion.
Finally, one work from the non-fiction stacks …
• The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century, by Kirk Wallace Johnson (Viking):
Edwin Rist, a 22-year-old home-schooled prodigy from upstate New York, brings unwanted scrutiny to the arcane and sometimes secretive circle of salmon-fly tiers when his “crime of the century” (at least in that world) unravels in Johnson’s The Feather Thief. Brilliant and protean, an extremely talented flautist with an intelligence bordering perhaps on Asperger’s Syndrome,
Rist broke into Britain’s Natural History Museum at Tring, in Hertfordshire, in June 2009 and stole hundreds of brightly colored bird skins, putting him in the enviable position of owning one of the greatest such collections ever amassed. He then sought to peddle individual feathers and entire birds to fellow fly tiers at top-dollar prices. Many of those species are protected by law, whether the birds are dead or alive. But Rist figured that some of the world’s best tiers would nonetheless want his rare and otherwise-unattainable feathers in order to create flies in the style of the pastime’s masters. He also convinced himself that he’d acted in the public service, freeing the natural beauty that had been hidden in museums for decades. Over the course of The Feather Thief, Johnson—a master of erudition, concision, and simplicity—will make you slightly conversant in evolution, ecology, woman’s fashions at the turn of the last century, the rise of the British Empire, and exotic birds among many other things, without ever coming across as a prig. And all of that information is wrapped around a story worthy of Arthur Conan Doyle.
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