Kemper's Reviews > The Innocents

I received a free advance copy of this for review from NetGalley.

It’s that time of year when Ace Atkins once again takes us on a tour of Tibbehah County, Mississippi, so I hope you’re ready to eat breakfast at Waffle House, shop at the Wal-Mart, kill an afternoon at a fishin’ hole, watch the local high school football team kick some ass, and then head over to the combination truck stop & strip club for a chicken fried steak and some wholesome entertainment.

Quinn Colson may not be the sheriff these days, but between gigs as a military contractor in Afghanistan he’s got plenty of things to keep an eye on back in his home town. His ne’er-do-well father is pitching a business idea that would mean asking one of his biggest enemies for a favor, his mother is angry that he’s even been talking to his formerly estranged dad, his romantic life is very complicated, and his sister has her hands full trying to run a faith based charity. And Quinn isn’t the only one with a full plate. His friend and former deputy, Lillie, is now the sheriff and dealing with a wide variety of small town crime, a tough as nails woman with shady connections has taken over the strip club with the assistance of a biker gang, a couple of bad boy teens seem on verge of turning into outright thugs, and a troubled young woman with a secret is so desperate to get out of town that she starts working at the nudie bar to make quick cash. When a horrible crime is committed that makes national news all of the citizens of Tibbehah find themselves affected by it.

Atkins continues to impress me with the way that he’s constructed a realistic rural environment populated with a variety of memorable characters that he then threads a crime story through. I also continue to marvel at how he can shift gears from writing the new Spenser novels in their Boston setting to this series and the style is markedly different between the two. The first person Spensers are naturally centered on the very urban private detective, but when he moves to Tibbehah County there’s a more relaxed rhythm as well as an opportunity for Atkins to write from the point of view of multiple characters. This pattern of getting a new Spenser story and then a Quinn Colson book a month or so later continues to be two events I circle on my reading calendar every year.

However, this one is probably my least favorite from this series so far. Usually there’s a central story with the other story threads spun off from it, but the motive and culprit behind the main crime thread this time seemed a bit obvious to me even though it’s played as a mystery. The things that happen in Tibbehah because of it are the more interesting angles, but a lot of these sub-plots are left dangling. That’s not out of the ordinary for Atkins who tends to leave a few threads uncut to pull on in the next book. However, this felt like most of it was in service of future stories like it was an episode of a TV show at mid-season trying to lay some groundwork for the finale.

Even Quinn feels more like a bystander than a main character in this which makes a certain amount of sense because he’s not the sheriff anymore, but some of the secondary characters also seem to have gotten lost in the shuffle. Quinn’s sister Caddy seems like she might play a role at a couple of points, but she just kind of vanishes from the story. There’s a subplot involving a Muslim clerk at a convenience store that also gets left behind in the third act.

This certainly isn’t a bad book, and I still enjoyed my annual visit to Tibbehah County while looking forward to more. It’s not necessarily a bad thing in an on-going series to leave some things hanging for future development, and it’s likely that Atkins will pay these off in the future. However, the emphasis on the set-up instead of pay-off made this a little unsatisfying when compared to the others of the series.