The set up:
Quinn Colson is on leave from the Army Rangers. His Uncle
Hemp, the local sheriff in nowhere northern Alabama has committed suicide. His
mom and sister are nothing to shout about; his mom is looking after her
grandson while the mom dances at a cheezy strip joint outside of Memphis. On
the road home, he picks up this pregnant teenager looking for her baby daddy
who has taken up with some people way down the food chain preparing for the
coming war. The group is led by Gowrie, an Ohio transplant who also cooks meth
at about 5-6 places in the county while being the local strong arm for Johnny
Stagg, the Boss Hog of the county.
Deputy Lillie (lady of course) thinks the suicide scene was
read improperly and that Uncle Hemp had been murdered. A high school friend of
Quinn’s, Boom, who didn’t come out of ‘Stan as well as did Quinn (missing an
arm, but gaining a decent case of PTSE), does snooping around the farm house
Uncle Hemp left him only to find out he was in debt to Stagg who was
positioning himself to take over Uncle Hemp’s land to pay off the debt. Apparently Stagg envisioned himself as some
sort of developer with plans to build a business park and hospital, but he
needs more and more land and more and more money from meth sales and the
Memphis mob.
The story revolves around the dance between Quinn, Stagg,
and Gowrie, with a side order of the pregnant teen, a defrocked preacher, and
untrustworthy law enforcement. Over the week of this story, Quinn manages to
root out the Memphis-Gowrie-Stagg-crooked cop connections and with his friend
Boom, disrupt the local meth operation, draw Gowrie and Stagg out into the open
and expose the suicide for the murder it truly was. But Quinn still has
problems with the truth behind the murder.
WC Don and I share a common Kindle archive (make that, WC
Don has allowed me access to his archive) and this was in there. I thought
Atkins has sculpted a very believable hero in Colson who becomes a reluctant liberator
of the counties denizens. Based on this first of the Colson series, I’d put
this in a second tier of characters and stories and for me, that’s in pretty
good company. Sort of on the same shelf as Jonathon King, whom I liked. I just
saw that Amazon has two Colson books (after he becomes the newly elected sheriff) on sale for $0.99 so I should be
posting again pretty soon.
East Coast Don
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