Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth.
Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South. But stay for, and linger in, the marvelous incidentals and atmospherics: arguments about mall names lore about snakes and birds and mushrooms descriptions of a local shade-tree tinkerer’s Slinky-like version of a perpetual motion machine. Come for the thriller, by all means it delivers nicely. As in The Killing Hills (2021), Offutt has fashioned a mystery plot that’s fast-paced, efficiently plotted, atmospheric, and compelling, but what again distinguishes the book is the author’s command of and affection for the setting and the people who live there. But when the dealer’s mother, the misanthropic and well-armed Shifty Kissick (a former love of Mick and Linda’s late father), asks Mick to investigate, he feels obligated to take a look.and the cycle of violence and revenge begins. Linda, who’s occupied with her reelection campaign-and the awful, endless round of glad handing, small favors, and pancake breakfasts it requires-is glad not to have the case on her plate. When the county’s heroin kingpin (or, it being a small place, the county’s heroin princeling) is found dead in a vacant downtown lot in the county seat, the city police are disinclined to investigate, on the “good riddance” principle of rough justice. Mick Hardin, of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, once again finds himself back home in Appalachia, freeloading on his sister, Linda, the no-nonsense county sheriff, while he recovers from a roadside bombing.
Another excellent Mick Hardin thriller set in rural eastern Kentucky.
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