• Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2022 May #1
  *Starred Review* Mick Hardin is still at home in the Kentucky hills, on leave from the army and nursing a shattered leg. As in The Killing Hills (2021), he finds himself obligated to deal with a mess driven by killing for vengeance, the plague of the hill people. This time it's Shifty Kissick, matriarch of a drug-dealing family that includes three sons, who comes calling, looking for the murderer of her son Barney. Mick reluctantly agrees to poke around—Shifty may be the local Ma Barker, but there's a heart beating somewhere beneath the shotgun she habitually holds at her chest. Then another of Shifty's brood, Mason, is found dead, raising the ante dramatically (Graveyard dirt ain't even tamped down yet, Shifty says, and I got to dig another hole.). When Shifty's remaining son, gay marine Raymond, who, like Mick, escaped the confining life of the Hills in search of personal freedom, arrives in Kentucky to help his mother, the two outsiders team up, tracking the killers to an abandoned mushroom farm now being used to stash toxic materials. The stage is set for a firefight, with Mick and Raymond keeping Mick's country-sheriff sister well out of the loop. This is country noir at its most powerful, combining cracking action with crystalline portraits of rough-hewn but savvy characters tragically forced to become retribution killers to stop yet another cycle of violence. Copyright 2022 Booklist Reviews.

Chris Offutt is the author of the short-story collections Kentucky Straight and Out of the Woods, the novel The Good Brother, and three memoirs: The Same River Twice, No Heroes, and My Father, the Pornographer. His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays, among many other places. He has written screenplays for Weeds, True Blood, and Treme, and has received fellowships from the Lannan and Guggenheim foundations.