The Broken Places by Ace Atkins
For a long time, I was wary of starting Ace Atkins’ Quinn Colson series. I’m not from the south but my dad is and I used to vacation there a lot. I know how often southern folk are caricaturized. I also know how people will write off the south’s racist legacy in favor of being “complex” (looking at you Gregory Iles, although I’ve never made it past 20 pages of a Penn Cage book so maybe he gets better). I assumed Quinn Colson, ex-Army Ranger, […]
“Please, bring a special friend for Larry,” says Larry’s mother when she prays, despairing for her son’s lonely existence and wishing better for him. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is a good, if somewhat predictable, mystery story that’s elevated by the quality of the prose and the character profiles of its two leads. From Goodreads: “In the late 1970s, Larry Ott and Silas “32” Jones were boyhood pals. Their worlds were as different as night and day: Larry, the child of lower-middle-class white parents, and Silas, the son […]
I don’t remember being tremendously impressed with Grisham’s more recent novels, but have always enjoyed his writing ability and his willingness to take on painful subjects, and so was excited to hear that he had done a sort of follow-up to A Time to Kill, one of his best. And while it did not disappoint, I have to admit that it lacked the high-octane appeal of earlier novels like The Pelican Brief and The Firm. But who says an author has to offer thrills and chills […]
