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Patrick Millikin interviews Ace Atkins about “The Heathens��

We’re finally able to share the good news, as Variety recently reported, that Tibbehah County is coming to a television near you. HBO has a series based on the Quinn Colson novels in development. The plan now is that the first season of the show will be based on the events in The Ranger, and follow the books fairly closely. To read more, click .

We love this . Short but sweet:

Which is fitting in case the time ever comes that Spenser, the late master Robert B. Parker’s greatest creation, gets retired from being a full-time white knight and his former apprentice is tapped as his successor.

For now, Z, the former college football star who fell into an abyss Spenser pulled him from, reappears to provide an able hand in����(G.P. Putnam’s Sons, $27). He’s on his home turf of Los Angeles in the latest in the Spenser books carried on since Parker’s 2010 death by Ace Atkins, a onetime college football star himself.

Since leaving Boston, Z has set up shop in a strip mall in Hollywood �� luckily enough for Spenser, who’s come west to track down a missing young woman.

They get drawn in, as Spenser does, to a world of trouble they must face and triumph over. This time, it involves a Hollywood movie mogul with #MeToo worries, Armenian mobsters and the male head of a cult-like female empowerment organization that echoes the real-life NXIVM.

The complex plot keeps things interesting but never gets in the way of what always matters most in the world Spenser inhabits. That’s the characters Parker brought to life and their singular voices.

Atkins, who goes back and forth between the iconic Boston P.I. and his own heroic crime-fiction creation,����the Army Ranger turned smalltown Mississippi sheriff, can’t lay claim to inventing Parker’s myth-worthy hero. But he has stayed true to his voice and his literate, dialogue-driven vision while keeping his characters compelling and allowing them to grow.

If you love crime fiction and aren’t already reading Ace Atkins, you should be.

Good reviews are always nice to read. Smart reviews �� such as this one by the Tampa Bay Times�� Colette Bancroft �� are a joy. Bancroft gets all the references and knows Spenser’s history inside-out.

Ace will be in Tampa tonight (Thursday, Nov. 21) at the Oxford Exchange at 6:30 p.m.

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Is Spenser still Spenser if you take him out of Boston?

Few characters are as closely connected to their home turf as the wisecracking, steel-tough private investigator created by Robert B. Parker. Fans of the books have followed Spenser through a city rendered in such loving detail that they feel they know it, too, even if they’ve never set foot in Beacon Hill or Back Bay.

But it does a man good to get out of town once in a while. In��Angel Eyes, the eighth Spenser novel by Ace Atkins and the 47th in the series, Spenser sallies forth to Los Angeles.

Atkins, a former reporter for the then-St. Petersburg Times��and the��Tampa Tribune, deftly took over the series after Parker’s death in 2010. Atkins is also the author of the Quinn Colson series, about a Mississippi sheriff; the 10th of those,��The Revelators, will be published in July.

Spenser has visited Los Angeles before, notably in��A Savage Place, the eighth novel in the series, when Parker sent him to the aid of Candy Sloan, a TV reporter investigating organized crime in Hollywood.

In��Angel Eyes, Spenser will discover that hasn’t changed much, although he’s on a different mission. Amanda Leggett, a friend of Spenser’s very significant other, Susan Silverman, has hired him to find her daughter, Gabrielle.

Gabby Leggett’s story is familiar: Beautiful girl with show biz ambitions heads to L.A. with stars in her eyes and meets all the wrong people. Gabby is 24, old enough to make her own bad decisions. But now she has disappeared �� even her Instagram account has no new posts! �� and her mother is frantic.

So Spenser goes west and enlists the aid of his formidable former protege, Zebulon Sixkill, who’s now a private eye in L.A. Their search for Gabby leads to her agent and ex-boyfriend, the nervous Eric Collinson, and then to a very powerful studio head, Jimmy Yamashiro, the kind of guy who’s rightly worried about Me Too repercussions.

But perhaps Gabby’s disappearance isn’t just a result of her chaotic sex life, as Spenser begins to suspect when a couple of thugs warn him and Z off the case, a conversation that devolves into a shootout in the parking lot of a shopping complex.

The trail soon leads both to an Armenian gang and to a mysterious group called HELIOS, led by a strange fellow named Joseph Haldorn. HELIOS is part pyramid scheme, part self-help scam and part sex cult, reminiscent of secretive groups ranging from Scientology to NXIVM. Is Gabby its innocent victim, or is she a willing part of something more sinister?

If the names Gabrielle Leggett and Joseph Haldorn and a plot involving a sex cult are setting off bells in your brain, you’ve probably read Dashiell Hammett’s 1928 hard-boiled classic��The Dain Curse. Those details are Atkins�� nod to one of the masters who shaped his writing, and Parker’s. Before Parker became a bestselling mystery writer, he was a professor of literature at Northeastern University. His 1971 dissertation was on the works of Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, three of the founding fathers of modern crime fiction.

The Dain Curse��is set in San Francisco, but the L.A. setting of��Angel Eyes��lets Atkins also salute Chandler and a number of other writers whose books are set there. If you’re a fan of Robert Crais�� novels, you’ll recognize the guy with red arrow tats that Spenser notices while jogging at Runyon Canyon Park.

The Hollywood milieu even allows for a sly meta reference to the upcoming Netflix movie based on��Wonderland, another of Atkins�� Spenser books. A movie producer friend asks if Spenser is trying to sell a script about his life: “’You’re too much of an old-fashioned good guy,�� he said. ‘White knight and all that crap. I’d make the hero fresh out of prison.’��

With assists from longtime allies on both sides of the law and from the indispensable Susan, Gabby will be found and lost and found again in a satisfyingly twisted plot that pits a cast of predators against each other, with Spenser in the middle trying to figure out which one is the most dangerous.

Colette Bancroft of the Tampa Bay Times :

The title of Ace Atkins�� ninth novel about Mississippi Sheriff Quinn Colson is a tipoff that one of the book’s main subjects is politics: It’s called��The Shameless.

Atkins, a former��St. Petersburg Times��and��Tampa Tribune��reporter, writes the Colson series as well as continuing the late Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series. (His eighth Spenser book,��Angel Eyes, will be published in November.) Colson is a native of the fictional town of Jericho in Tibbehah County, Miss., a man with a deep knowledge of his state’s problems who refuses to surrender to them.

“He’d been sheriff now for nearly a decade and he still wasn’t sure the state was getting any better. It was the entire reason he’d retired early as a U.S. Army Ranger, believing he could make a difference, fighting corruption, drug running, and violence in his own backyard.��

As��The Shameless��opens, he’s feeling discouraged. With his new wife, Maggie, Quinn is making an obligatory appearance at the county fair, where the two hear a speech by a slick, silver-haired politician named Jimmy Vardaman, whom Quinn knows all too well.

“Vardaman,�� Atkins writes, “had kept a big hunt lodge in Tibbehah County for decades, the source of wild rumor and sustained fact, a place where he’d worked out deals with some of the most corrupt sorry-ass people in north Mississippi. Several times Vardaman had been on the fringe of people Quinn had either sent to jail or shot. But Vardaman always slipped clear of it, like a man who stepped in cow s�� and came out smelling like Chanel No. 5.��

Now Vardaman is running for governor on a populist platform that stops just half a breath short of outright racism, spouting religious platitudes despite his skeevy past. The crowds love him.

Quinn and Maggie don’t, but when they leave partway through his speech they’re confronted by a clutch of black-clad thugs who tell Quinn he “ain’t got no right trying to make Senator Vardaman uncomfortable.��

“Quinn had met a hundred guys like this,�� Atkins writes, “wannabe Special Forces operators who took online courses and drooled over gun magazines.�� When one of them threatens Maggie, Quinn steps up. “Didn’t even drop your cigar,�� she says admiringly.

Another of Vardaman’s devoted supporters in Jericho is a Bible-thumping county official known to all as Old Man Skinner. His current project is raising money to erect a 60-foot cross next to the highway, where it will obscure a “damn Mississippi landmark,�� the big neon sign for a strip club called Vienna’s Place. It’s a classic situation �� campaigning politicians raging righteously against the vice they happily indulge in once the votes are counted.

The club’s proprietor, the lovely and formidable Fannie Hathcock, has a more pressing problem: a turf battle she’s fighting against other Mississippi organized crime bosses, including a Tunica casino mogul and a Choctaw chief.

In the last Colson novel,��The Sinners, one casualty of those turf wars was Quinn’s best friend and fellow vet, Boom Kimbrough, who is now struggling to recover from a savage beating. Quinn’s fierce former deputy, Lillie Virgil, now a U.S. Marshal, has made it her business to arrest a dirtbag named Wes Taggart, one of Boom’s attackers. (Quinn shot the other one.) She captures Taggart with the help of his ex-girlfriend, a high school senior turned stripper “whose real name was Tiffany Dement but went by Twilight to avoid professional confusion.�� Taggart’s arrest, however, will trigger further chaos.

Meanwhile, Quinn’s sister Caddy, a recovering addict, is running her ministry for refugees and poor and homeless people on half a shoestring and trying to figure out why Bentley Vandeven, a rich kid from Memphis, is romancing her.

Into that mix of the usual homegrown characters Quinn deals with, Atkins tosses a couple of folks from the big city �� Brooklyn, to be exact. Tashi Coleman and Jessica Torres are settling into Jericho to do research for their true-crime podcast,��Thin Air. They’re digging into the disappearance 20 years ago of a local teenager, Brandon Taylor, who vanished while deer hunting. When he was found with a bullet through his head, his death was deemed a suicide, but his family doesn’t buy it.

It’s not just another cold case for Quinn. Brandon was a few years younger, but Quinn knew him in high school. And Brandon’s girlfriend then was Maggie Powers �� now Quinn’s wife. Her young son, whom Quinn is about to adopt, is named after Brandon.

Tashi and Jessica are also chasing rumors that the former sheriff, Hamp Beckett, who was Quinn’s uncle, might have covered up the real nature of Brandon’s death.

That’s a lot of plot lines, but Atkins keeps them running smooth and hitting on all pistons as the action accelerates. Could Fannie’s power struggles and Caddy’s “Ole Miss frat boy�� suitor and Brandon Taylor’s long-ago death and Vardaman’s current campaign all be related? You’ll be surprised.

Contact Colette Bancroft at [email protected] or (727) 893-8435. Follow @colettemb.

Kendal Weaver of the Associated Press examines THE SHAMELESS in:

Ace Atkins�� latest in his Quinn Colson series finds the rural Mississippi sheriff wrestling with modern media and current political discontent.

On the media side, “Thin Air,�� a crime-solving podcast out of New York City, latches onto an old death case with links to Colson in his teenage years. He becomes a suspect in the eyes of the multi-episode podcast. Was a boy’s murder covered up?

Meanwhile, Colson probes criminal acts in Tibbehah County possibly tied to a disreputable candidate for governor, Jimmy Vardaman, who has rolled over Mississippi’s establishment elite and surged into the lead. Rabid supporters sport rebel flags. One holds a sign, “Deplorable Lives Matter.�� Armed men in black T-shirts and dark glasses protect him.

“This past year I’ve been called a radical and a racist,�� Vardaman says in a stump speech at the Neshoba County Fair. “But let me tell you something, friends, don’t you listen to what the fake news tells you.��

Atkins peppers the narrative with allusions to President Donald Trump, but he also sticks to Colson saga basics: The sheriff is battling backwoods crime �� prostitution, drugs, corruption �� that he hoped to clean up when he retired as an Army Ranger, returned home to Jericho and won election.

“The Shameless,�� like Atkins�� earlier Colson books, ties the sheriff’s family history and personal life to the broader Tibbehah County intrigues and investigations. This brings several story lines into play as the podcast team raises questions about the shooting death of a high-school teenager 20 years earlier deep in a forest.

There is a sudden plot twist that some may view as a flaw in the narrative structure. But Atkins tends to smooth this out as further events unfold, and the surprise element is a feature of the novel.

Country music, blues and a variety of popular songs are invoked in many scenes; one of the songs is the Garth Brooks�� cover of “Shameless.�� But the book’s title, for the most part, refers to those who, without apology, twist truth or commit crimes to serve themselves. That’s a tough foe, even for Quinn Colson.

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Listen to the audio of Ace’s conversation with Drake Hall at Novel in Memphis, Tennessee on July 10, 2019.

Thanks to fan Sara Wells for the great pictures!

Check out The Shameless, out now or at your favorite local bookstore.