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Offutt's fourth novel is worth reading. Raised in the Appalachian foothills himself, Offutt does not seem to patronize his hill characters. He presents a world in which family pride and loyalty are worn as armor against life's harshness—indeed, sometimes these are the only protection. Offutt's P.I., Mick Hardin, has appeared in previous works. In the present work, Mick, armored with a hardboiled personality, slowly recovering from a combat injury, tries to discover why someone is killing the last few sons left to Shifty Kissick, a hard, bitter, silent hill woman.
Dramatis personae: Mick Hardin, cynical, angry, recovering from an IED injury sustained during his service in Afghanistan; his sister, County Sheriff Linda Hardin, whose foul mouth embarrasses her brother, and who is running for re-election; Sandra Caldwell, Linda's smart and available dispatcher; Jacky Turner, an endearing and brilliant inventor whom Mick hires to fix his car—but their relationship is fated to fail; F***ing Barney Kissick (that's what they call him, I kid you not), son of a hill family, once the local heroin pusher, now a corpse; Barney's brother Mason Kissick, a short-timer in our tale, none too gifted between the ears; Shifty Kissick, their hard, silent mother who is fast running out of sons, and who knows rather a lot about the heroin business; Ray, Shifty's last living son, in the Black Ops of the Marines, home to help bury his brothers, and perhaps in the market for a spot of revenge; Rich Lange, rival drug dealer to Shifty's family, who lives in the hills under constant armed guard; police personnel, town characters, experts in forensics, and some Really Bad Dudes.
As Mick Hardin is home on leave, the bodies of men his age with whom he went to school start appearing. When one of Shifty's boys comes to town to ask Mick to visit his grieving and angry mother, Mick complies, but as he listens, he knows that proud hill woman is not telling all she knows. Against his better sense, Mick begins to look into the killings. When the killers burn down Mick's father's old cabin in the hills, the search for murderers becomes personal. Mick follows a trail involving bags of heroin, which are marked, not with Shifty's family mark, and not with Shifty's competitor Rich Lange's family mark, either. Mick begins to follow the trail of the mysterious mark, looking for killers.
But that is only part of the story. If all murder mysteries were a series of plot twists, they would be easily forgotten. Offutt, however, paints a civilization hidden because it distrusts all outsiders. In the hills of Kentucky (and viewed through Mick's bitter, yet compassionate intelligence), hill families trust only their own. Their fierce pride makes them self-sufficient to a fault. Mick has to work his way through the maze of pride and grief in order to be allowed access to family secrets that can help him solve the killings; it is the meeting between the angry Army CID officer and the case-hardened code of the hill families that gives intelligent insight into the human heart and mind.
Offutt's novel is good because Offutt loves his characters enough to give them life. With them, we can grieve or laugh. Mick's sister, the sheriff, lives in the real and confusing world of the small-town county sheriff. She pounds signs into neighbor's yards, promising to forgive her neighbors' children their trespasses; her department takes a call about a dog up a tree (a dog up a tree?). Mick visits an ancient bachelor who, living alone in the woods, hovers over and protects each baby bird as it learns to fly from the trees in his yard. A grocery store employee pretends to take hostages so he can get enough money to buy his girlfriend a necklace. Offutt's novel is replete with details that brand the humanity pictured within as real, because you can't make this stuff up.
SHIFTY'S BOYS ends with a twist that takes us into a dark cave of Kentucky and a darkness of our culture. For those who need a bit of action in their mysteries, a tense and tenuous firefight decides which side has won the upper hand.
§ Cathy Downs, retired from her position as professor of English, spends her days keeping her garden, studying geology, and reading murder mysteries.
Reviewed by Cathy Downs, May 2022
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