The Broken Places

Atkins's third book in the "Quinn Colson" series (after The Ranger and The Lost Ones) begins when intelligent, nasty thugs Esau and Bones escape the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman Farm so they can recover some loot they left with murderer and ex-con Jamey Dixon. A fascinating character, Jamey found Jesus and is now giving his all to preaching. He's one of them deep thinkers (says things like, "[m]y Jesus would dig Marshall Tucker"), who believes "…everything he read from the Bible or learned from Johnny Cash" and is mutually besotted with his girlfriend Caddy. Local sheriff Quinn Colson is a dutiful, likable 13-tour vet of Iraq who stays calm in the most painstakingly tense situations. The big problem them boys don't know is that Quinn is also Caddy's brother. Anyone who puts a Southern man's beloved sister close to dangerous conflict is going to have a problem The three-pointed conflagration coincides with a combo-meal rainstorm/flood/tornado ripping the area apart, itself a culmination of Atkins's concise, but masterly, descriptions of Southern weather. Hidden agendas muddy typical good/bad guy dynamics and Atkins has real men grappling with classic themes like redemption, duty, villainy, and sympathy; his knack for realistic dialog is especially attuned to the direct, Southern way of speaking that conveys volumes about the speaker's nobility or crudeness.