Revelation

When Quinn Colson returned to his hometown of Jericho, Mississippi, in 2011, his desire to learn more about why his uncle, the Tibbehah County sheriff, took his own life led him to uncover dark and ugly deeds beneath the surface of the small town. Over the next several books, as Quinn took on, lost and regained the role of sheriff himself he started peeling back the layers of the fetid onion of corruption that went from Tibbehah County all the way to the top of the state and its movers, shakers and fixers. In recent Colson novels, Ace Atkins hs ramped up the confrontation level as Quinn became more and more of a problem to those folks and their attempts to deal with him kept failing.

The ninth Colson book, The Shameless, ended with Quinn clinging to his life following an ambush. As The Revelators opens, we find time, effort and support from his friends and family have Quinn ready to take advantage of the mistake his opponents made: Leaving him alive. But he finds that political maneuverings will be tougher to handle than he thought. The power brokers installed an acting sheriff in his stead and have taken the reins of authority in Tibbehah County in a firm grip. Though federal agents close in on both the corrupt behind-the-scenes players and their more overt agents and operations, Quinn's resources will be small. The popular law-and-order moves of his replacement and his handlers make that the people of Tibbehah County less happy with Quinn's more nuanced approach as well.

The Revelators earns credit for not following the pattern of earlier books and for creating some final resolution in the long-building feud between Quinn and the corruption of Mississippi politics. Whether this arc was a part of Atkins' plan all along or something that developed a few books into the series, it's dominated the most recent half of the Colson novels and not always to their benefit. More than one story of Quinn uncovering the nefariosity of the supposedly respectable folk of Jericho, and the protection the powerful offered to those clearly disrespectable folk wound up with a tag that promised more of the same. Atkins' increasingly suffocating use of his local color trappings have made what started as a tight series into a set of repeated wearying marches through the same grimy morass. Yes, The Revelators ends with a tag that suggests some of the old sleaze will slide into the newly created vacuum, but with the Big Bad of state corruption and its connection to organized crime gone the series has a chance to recover some of its momentum.

As for The Revelators itself, the plot hangs on a main villain who's a thinly disguised Donald Trump with some Boss Hogg seasoning. Quinn's replacement taps into what Atkins presents as barely-veiled racism on the part of everyone in the county except for Quinn and his friends and family, indicting everyone for the villain's misdeeds. In earlier novels Atkins used that reality to give tone to his work but for whatever reason by the time we get to The Revelators it's just the constantly clanging gong dominating any other note.

Atkins has created several series over his career, as well as producing fictionalized treatments of some real-life crimes and events. Following the death of Robert B. Parker, he began writing novels with that author's mainstay literate tough-guy Boston private eye Spenser. The Revelators completes a Colson arc and could be a good stopping place for this particular series. Especially if Atkins maintains the interest in repetitive political commentary and stereotyped characters that have dominated the last four or so entries.