The Heathens - Ace Atkins

The Heathens is the eleventh novel in Ace Atkins’s Sheriff Quinn Colson series. The series began in 2011 with The Ranger, and Atkins has added a new novel to the series every year since the first one. That is a fairly standard schedule for most series authors, but the remarkable thing about Atkins is that he has been able to keep to his book-a-year schedule even after having been tapped by the Robert B. Parker estate to continue Parker’s outstanding Spenser series of books. Since 2012 Atkins has added ten new novels to that forty-nine-book series. 

As The Heathens opens, Sheriff Quinn Colson is in a good place. He and Maggie have a new baby girl, and Quinn is closer than ever to Brandon, Maggie’s little boy. Maggie, a nurse, and the children have brought new life to the old family farm Quinn has lived on his whole life. Now almost forty years old, Quinn is a genuinely happy man for the first time in his life. Some things, however, never change — and the Byrd family is one of those things. It seems like something is always going on with the Byrds that requires the sheriff’s attention. If it’s not Gina Byrd, a drug addict who regularly suffers physical abuse at the hands of the men in her life, it’s TJ, Gina’s sixteen-year-old daughter, who is accused of petty theft or fighting again. 

But it won’t be so simple this time. Now, Gina Byrd has disappeared, and after her body is found and TJ and her boyfriend Ladarius become suspects in the murder, the teens and TJ’s nine-year-old brother hit the road, always just barely one step ahead of the law. The problem is that Quinn is not the only one chasing them — and not all the chasers are interested in keeping the kids alive long enough to figure out exactly what happened to Gina Byrd. 

Among the chasers is Lillie Virgil, a former deputy of Quinn’s who is now a U.S. Marshal. Unlike Quinn, Lillie is already convinced that TJ and Ladarius are guilty of murder and she is determined to catch up with them. So while Lillie chases the teens from state to state, Quinn investigates the case from Tibbeha County, Mississippi. And the more he learns, the more he is convinced that TJ and Ladarius had nothing to do with the murder of TJ’s mother. The problem is that someone very much wants to see TJ and Ladarius dead rather than in a jail cell. Now, he and Lillie need to catch up with the runaways before their Bonnie-and-Clyde-like chase ends up just like the original one. 

Bottom Line: Longtime readers of the Quinn Colson series feel comfortable in the Tibbeha County setting, and they will enjoy again catching up with their favorite characters (even the bad guys). By this point, the sheriff has done much to clean up the county corruption the former sheriff, Quinn’s own uncle, more often than not turned a blind eye to, but there’s still a lot to do. Some things just never seem to change. 

Ace Atkins

Review Copy provided by Publisher