Shifty's Boys

Offutt's powerful follow-up to The Killing Hills is just as rich in atmospherics and a master-class in the craft of crime fiction... Offutt has created a wildly compelling private eye series full of memorable characters, drawn with an observant eye and a passion for the local terrain * CrimeReads (Most Anticipated Books, Summer 2022) * With The Killing Hills and now Shifty's Boys, Chris Offut has launched a fantastic and compelling new crime novel series, and as a reader you may come to these books for the murders and the mysteries, rendered as they are with great page-turning style and thrilling action, but there's even more at work here. These books are also about a place and its people, and the result is a vivid portrait infused with insight and wisdom, humanity and affection. I eagerly await the next Mick Hardin! -- Jonathan Ames, author of A Man Named Doll How can it be that after just two of Chris Offutt's Mick Hardin novels I love a bunch of the characters like they were my own family? I'm not even from Kentucky. And how can it be that these books are as thrilling and funny as a great crime show yet still exhibit the scraped, lean vernacular sentences readers of Offutt's short fiction have come to admire? Here's hoping Hardin rides for a good long while -- Jonathan Lethem, author of The Arrest Shifty's Boys is a tale of vengeance that asks difficult questions about the nature and value of honor, every line delivered with the relentless efficiency of a wolf stripping meat from a bone. In Mick Hardin, Chris Offutt has created a complex, brooding hero, a man whose moral code was hewn from Kentucky hill-country rock. As his world turns darker and dirtier by the minute, once the brutal work is done, we are left with only a few words. More Mick, please -- Christopher Yates, author of Grist Mill Road