“The Shameless” (Putnam, $27) is the latest in crime-fiction mainstay Ace Atkins’ Quinn Colson series, and it finds the rural Mississippi sheriff in even stranger circumstances than usual.
A crime-solving podcast out of New York City latches onto an old killing with links to Colson from his teenage years. He becomes a suspect in the eyes of the multi-episode podcast “Thin Air,” which raises the prospect that a teenager’s murder was covered up years ago.
Colson meanwhile must investigate criminal acts in fictional Tibbehah County that might be tied to a disreputable candidate for governor, Jimmy Vardaman, who has rolled over Mississippi’s establishment elite and surged into the lead.
“This past year I’ve been called a radical and a racist,” Vardaman says in a speech at a county fair. “But let me tell you something, friends, don’t you listen to what the fake news tells you.”
Atkins — a former Florida newspaper reporter who splits his novel-writing these days between the Colson books and continuing the late Robert B. Parker’s Spenser stories — peppers the narrative here with allusions to President Donald Trump.
But he also sticks with 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.
As with past Colson books, “The Shameless” 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 a teenager’s shooting death 20 years earlier deep in a forest.
There’s a sudden plot twist that some might see as a flaw in the narrative structure. But, as things unfold, Atkins tends to smooth this out, 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 Garth Brooks’ cover of “Shameless.”
But the book’s title largely refers to anyone who, without apology, twists the truth or commits crimes to serve himself.
Even for Quinn Colson, that’s a tough foe.
