SUPER BOWL SPECIAL: ACE ATKINS' ROBERT B PARKER'S CHEAP SHOT

I read Cheap Shot on the flight to Minneapolis for Super Bowl LII, and considering the plot revolves around a New England Patriots' player whom Spencer is hired to protect/keep out of trouble, it seemed appropriate.

The trouble, of course, finds star linebacker Kinjo Heywood, in a way both unexpected and more severe than we might expect when his son is kidnapped. Immediately Spenser is in his usual wisecracking trouble with the head of security for the Pats, with Heywood's agent, his business manager/brother, and the FBI, all of whom want him off the case. And it's a complicated case, going back to a nightclub shooting in New York a couple of years before, which may have involved Heywood's crew. It's as if Ray Lewis had come back to play for Bill Belichick.

I've reviewed Ace Atkins' Spenser before, you can link to that here, and he gets the tone of the Parker novels better than any of the others I've read who've been carrying on with the characters. Like Lullaby, the main villain remains off-stage for most of the book, and in some ways we wonder if at least one of the sub-plots has been overlooked in the end. It was a complicated web which Atkins wove around the star player, which reflects perfectly the world of high-paid athletes in a violent, short-career sport.

One problem with the first-person narration is trying to fill out characters so we understand, not necssarily them, but their effect on others. In this case, Heywood's second-wife seems sketchily drawn, and what we see of her leads us to wonder exactly what Heywood sees in her. While it's obvious what Hawk sees in Heywood's first wife, and long-time readers might feel disappointed not to see Hawk tamed at last.

Atkins does with Spenser what Parker did: build fast moving stories that centre on personalities, and Cheap Shot is another good example. Even if the Patriots did lose the Super Bowl without Heywood.

Robert B Parker's Cheap Shot by Ace Atkins
No Exit Press, £8.99, ISBN 9781843444497 

NOTE; This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

ACE ATKINS' BROKEN PLACES

Ace Atkins introduced Quinn Colson in The Ranger, and when I reviewed that book last year (you can link to the review here) I noted the tropes from westerns (which Ace and I had discussed with Mariella Frostrup on Open Book), and from novels and films about returning war veterans, itself a sub-genre that goes back to encompass at least the Civil War.

Colson is now the sheriff of Tibbehah County, Mississippi, based in Jericho, where he exists in an sort of uneasy truce with the local crime boss Johnny Stagg. The novel opens with a prison break from Parchman Farm, famous from blues songs. Esau Davis and Bones Magee make their getaway on horses, just like in a western, but from there the story gets very modern. Because they're headed for Jericho, where one of their former convict pals, Jamey Dixon, has seen the light, and is a fundamentalist preacher with a line in redemption. And, coincidentally, he's living with Colson's sister Caddy, who's got a line in redemption herself.

And then it gets complicated. What Atkins does well is delineate the violence that simmers just under the overheated surface of rural Mississippi. It's something that gets pushed aside in the daily life of the people, just as the the rest of the darker side of human behaviour does. At times Atkins' prose, which in this series is very much in the Elmore Leonard vein, touches on the Southern gothic overtones of a Flannery O'Connor, and it is a pleasure to read.

But Atkins is also writing the continuation of Robert B. Parker's Spenser novels, and very well too (see my review of Lullaby here), and at times Quinn Colson starts to resemble Parker's Jesse Stone. He is partnered by a wise black woman sheriff. He has a relationship with his former true love, Anna Lee, who's now married to the good-guy town doctor. And although he doesn't have Stone's ability to charm a steady stream of women, the town undertaker and coroner, Ophelia, seems to have a soft spot for him. Anna Lee, Ophelia, Jericho, Esau...it gets very literary, if not downright Biblical, down there in the Gothic South.

This is a series book, and though it gets resolved with action and violence, enough issues both violent and non-violent, are left unresolved to ensure the next entry in the series will continue to put Colson into perilous positions. There's something major breathing under the surface of the Colson series, and it will be fascinating to see what Atkins does with those intimations.

The Broken Places by Ace Atkins

Corsair £7.99 ISBN 9781472112156