![]() ![]() In the same way Connelly brings journalistic detail to his portrayal of Los Angeles, Atkins fills Tibbehah County with Southerners who may be poor and uneducated, but never devolve into cliché. Like Michael Connelly, creator of the popular Bosch book and television series, Atkins spent years working as an investigative crime reporter, a job that Connelly once described to Chapter 16 as putting him “in close proximity to crime scenes and detectives and victims and just about everything I write about now.” The average length of each Quinn Colson installment has grown over the years as Atkins weaves ever more intricate plotlines, but his journalistic grounding raises his crime fiction above competitors. ![]() While this idea drives the plot, his commitment to character and setting keep the book readable. “I wish that every novelist could have the benefit of being in a newsroom at some point, of writing about real characters, real people.” Ace Atkins In the book’s promotional material, he asks the question that drove him to use the story in fiction: “What if these kids had been framed and were innocent?” ![]() “I wish that every novelist could have the benefit of being in a newsroom at some point, of writing about real characters, real people,” Atkins said in a recent interview with the Tampa Bay Times. This complex character and her cross-country dash through the book’s 400 pages were inspired by a real teenage murder suspect that Atkins covered as a reporter for the Tampa Tribune in 1998: Valessa Robinson, a Florida teen eventually caught in Texas and ultimately convicted of murder along with her criminal boyfriend, Adam “Rattlesnake” Davis. In flashbacks, we learn of Colson’s investigation into the murder and his growing suspicion that TJ, while certainly a bad seed, might not be a murderer. The chief suspect, TJ, is on the run with her nine-year-old brother, her car-stealing boyfriend, and a wannabe social media star they pick up after breaking into an Arkansas lake house. The book opens with Gina - a hard-drinking partier with perhaps the worst reputation in a county full of bad ones - already murdered, her mutilated body stuffed in a barrel and tossed in a ditch. He’s now busily turning his former strip joint into a family-friendly “frontier town.” Stagg is also a silent partner in a liquor store fronted by ne’er-do-well businessman Chester Pratt, who is dating a woman named Gina Boyd, whose 17-year-old daughter TJ becomes the novel’s focus. The criminal kingpin Johnny Stagg returns after an absence from more recent books, having allegedly found religion and gone straight. He’s still at the job a decade later in The Heathens, the 11th novel in the series. In 2011’s The Ranger, Ace Atkins introduced Sheriff Quinn Colson, a cigar-smoking war hero who returns home to fictional Tibbehah County, Mississippi, to find a den of corruption that needs cleaning. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |