THE KILLING HILLS

Acclaimed Kentucky writer Offutt follows Country Dark (2018) with another fine example of what might be called holler noir.

Mick Hardin is a military homicide investigator who's temporarily AWOL, back in eastern Kentucky to sort things out with his pregnant wife, from whom he's estranged. He's holed up in his grandfather's remote cabin, drinking himself into a stupor, when his sister—the county's newly appointed sheriff, under pressure from several directions—shows up to enlist his help. An old man hunting ginseng has discovered a body up in the hills, and Linda Hardin needs the case solved, quickly and discreetly. This book looks like a standard thriller. It hits the genre's marks: a Chapter 1 corpse, a hard-drinking knight errant of a detective, etc. Ultimately, though, Offutt's primary emphasis—and the book's—falls less on the title's central word than on its final one. The star is rural Kentucky. Mick knows the land and its flora; knows the clannish, laconic, battle-scarred, loyal, often mistrustful people who live here. The book's triumph is that Offutt understands the difference between local color—which would be mere decoration—and local knowledge, which turns out to be the crucial advantage Mick has in unraveling the case (and humiliating hired guns from outside). Mick knows how to read the landscape, how to win the trust of those he needs to talk to (at one point he works a neat trick in replacing a mule that was serving as a temporary roof support), how to negotiate the blood oaths and rules of family vengeance that obtain in such places. The murder plot ends up being nearly secondary, but that's not to the novel's disadvantage: In place of plot convolutions, Offutt offers those of Appalachian folkways. The result is a fast-paced, satisfying read.

Rural crime fiction that kicks like a mule.