In this blistering return to Chris Offutt’s acclaimed crime series, Mick Hardin is tested like never before as familial allegiances and old wounds collide, threatening to destroy everything he lovesWith his signature crackling prose, literary master Chris Offutt has staked out his own territory in crime fiction, a place of familial allegiances, old wounds, and revenge—the code of the hills. His new book, a sharp, twisty southern noir with echoes of James Sallis and...

A veteran on leave investigates a murder in his Kentucky backwoods hometown in this Appalachian noir by the acclaimed author of Country Dark.Mick Hardin, a combat veteran and Army CID agent, is home on a leave to be with his pregnant wife—but they aren't getting along. His sister, newly risen to sheriff, has just landed her first murder investigation—but local politicians are pushing for someone else to take the case. Maybe they think she can't handle it. O...

"A smart, rich country noir" from the acclaimed author Kentucky Straight and The Good Brother (Stewart O'Nan, bestselling author of Henry, Himself).Chris Offutt is an outstanding literary talent, whose work has been called "lean and brilliant" ( The New York Times Book Review) and compared by reviewers to Tobias Wolff, Ernest Hemingway, and Raymond Carver. He's been awarded the Whiting Writers Award for Fiction/N...

Master storyteller Chris Offutt’s acclaimed crime series has been praised by Ian Rankin as “righteous Kentucky noir with top notes of Daniel Woodrell and S. A. Cosby,” and in this breakneck new novel, sheriff Mick Hardin navigates the treacherous terrain of a town’s festering secrets and the violent forces who want to keep them hiddenLauded as a “masterclass in the craft of crime fiction” (CrimeReads), Chris Offutt’s beloved and critically acclaimed Mick H...

Mick Hardin is back in the hills of Kentucky. He’d planned to touch down briefly before heading to France, marking the end to his twenty-year Army career. In Rocksalt, his sister Linda the sheriff is investigating the murder of Pete Lowe, a sought-after mechanic at the local racetrack. After another body is found, Linda and her deputy Johnny Boy Tolliver wonder if the two murders are related. Linda steps into harm’s way just as a third body turns up and Mick ends up being deputized again, ...

Army cop-turned-small-town-investigator Mick Hardin returns to Appalachia in this propulsive thriller from the award-winning author of The Killing Hills.Mick Hardin is an Army CID officer home on leave, recovering from an IED attack and flirting with prescription painkillers, when a body is found in the center of town. It's Barney Kissick, the local heroin dealer, and the city police see it as an occupational hazard. But when Barney's mother, Shifty, asks M...

Mick Hardin, a combat veteran now working as an Army CID agent, is home on a leave that is almost done. His wife is about to give birth, but they aren’t getting along. His sister, newly risen to sheriff, has just landed her first murder case, and local politicians are pushing for city police or the FBI to take it over. Are they convinced she can’t handle it, or is there something else at work? She calls on Mick, who, with his homicide investigation experience and familiarity with the terra...

Master storyteller Chris Offutt’s acclaimed crime series has been praised by Ian Rankin as “righteous Kentucky noir with top notes of Daniel Woodrell and S. A. Cosby,” and in this breakneck new novel, sheriff Mick Hardin navigates the treacherous terrain of a town’s festering secrets and the violent forces who want to keep them hidden.Lauded as a “masterclass in the craft of crime fiction” (CrimeReads), Chris Offutt’s beloved and critically acclaimed Mick ...

Kentucky straight is bourbon with no mixer. Kentucky Straight is Kentucky seen without nostalgic gloss. These riveting, often heartbreaking stories, take us through country that is unmapped. They are set in a nameless Appalachian community too small to be called a town, a place where wanting an education is a mark of ungodly arrogance and dowsing for water a legitimate occupation; where hunting is not a sport but a means of survival. These are stories of coal miners and backwoods ...

When Andrew Offutt died, his son, Chris, inherited a desk, a rifle, and eighteen hundred pounds of pornographic fiction. Andrew had been considered the "king of twentieth-century smut," with a writing career that began as a strategy to pay for his son's orthodontic needs and soon took on a life of its own, peaking during the 1970s when the commercial popularity of the erotic novel reached its height.With his dutiful wife serving as typist, Andrew wrote from their home in the Kentuc...

“Top-notch, shot through with menace and melancholy.”—The New York Times Book Review, on the Mick Hardin novelsOld feuds. New blood. A spree of murders in the Kentucky hills dredges up the past and sets an already divided town on the course of bloody retribution in this harrowing return to a series with “top notes of Daniel Woodrell and S. A. Cosby” (Ian Rankin)Mick Hardin never thought he’d live this long. A former Army CID office...

Half the Glasgow polis think DI Alison McCoist is bent. The other half just think she’s a fuck-up.No one thinks very much at all about carwash employee Davey Burnet, until one day he takes the wrong customer’s motor for a ride.One kidnapping later, he and the carwash are officially part of Glasgow’s criminal underworld, working for a psychopath who enjoys playing games like ‘Keep Yer Kneecaps’ with any poor bastard who crosses him.Can Davey escape from the gang’s clutc...