Kerry Hood was in publishing for many years, working in publicity for several publishers over the time, working on fiction and non-fiction titles. Crime and thrillers have always been those she turns to first, however, and the ones she reads late at night or when she has a quiet moment.
Chris Offut writes glorious Kentucky noir fiction. His military policeman character, Mick Hardin, is a tired, tough, hardened man, whose understanding of the human condition, and the awful things that he has seen in war, make him both more resigned to wrongdoing, whilst at the same time more unforgiving. He knows what makes people tick, and much of it depresses him deeply.
Back in the Kentucky hills because of his ex-wife – a relationship Mick was once hoping to salvage - and having just resigned from the army, he finds a home he is uncertain he wants back in his life. His sister, Linda is the local sheriff, and he first accepts a temporary job as her deputy (in an earlier book) and now a temporary job as sheriff while Linda recovers from a gunshot wound. There are a lot of temporaries, and not many permanencies in his life.
Going back to a place where a family’s lineage is beaten into the hills themselves, and everyone knows everyone else’s history, finds Mick reluctant to lay down the law to the fullest. There are familiar boundaries over which he will not step, even if this piles up future trouble for him. Then when a local bartender is killed, Mick’s ex-wife calls for his help as it seems her new husband has been arrested for the murder. Instead, the man denies murder but confesses to Mick he is having an affair. Before you know it, Mick is mired in trouble. There is the crooked out-of-town money man seemingly wanting to change a trailer park into a shopping mall, local thugs up against thugs from Belarus, deeper, wider trouble involving the FBI, Homeland Security, a British intelligence agent, bodies, guns, intrigue, and killing.
Corsica is in there too … as an intriguing refuge when body and soul need healing.
Blood is shed against a mountain background of jonquils, chickadees, blue jays, sugar maples and sycamores; the hills as much involved in the story as the villains and heroes. This is a rare backdrop to crime thrillers, and all the more precious because of it. Offut is a short story writer, an essayist, a screenwriter and author of The Killing Hills, Shifty’s Boys and Code of the Hills in the Mick Hardin series, as well as other fiction and non-fiction. You can read the Hardin books in any order, but as with all series, you will become more involved if you start at the beginning. They are well worth total immersion.
