But Duffy doesn't much care, because he wants to do one thing: solve crimes and help those who've been wronged by lawbreakers. He'll drink too much, smoke more weed than he should and even indulge in that great 1980s pastime, cocaine, but he has before him finding out who killed a wealthy husband and wife and why. At first their son's death, complete with suicide note, seems to close the case. But then the son's girlfriend also appears to take her own life and that doesn't add up for Duffy, despite pressure from his superiors to mark the matter closed. The threads he follows will lead him to and through layers of conspiracy that will brush up against some well-known real-life incidents and people.
Adrian McKinty had originally intended on just a trilogy of Duffy novels, but found himself persuaded to continue them as a series. Writing about his own hometown and situations which he witnessed himself more than once, he can set the scene with precision and flair. Duffy is bleakly droll, as you might imagine for a man who never starts his car without checking for a mercury switch bomb attached underneath.
He makes Belfast -- specifically the mid-80s Belfast where The Troubles were metastasizing in connection with Middle Eastern terrorism to make a devil's brew of violence and death -- a character in the story. Duffy's mordant view of his own life and woes mirrors the way that many folks in Belfast found themselves living, where they did not know if the next trip to the pub or the store or church might bring them in contact with a bomb or murder squad. The hopelessness that permeates this life extends into the hopelessness he and many of his fellow officers feel about whether or not they can solve these murders -- or any crimes, when the only group that's hated more than the criminals are those out to catch them. Even though it all seems to be shades of dismal gray, McKinty uses the local color of the places he knows to strengthen his story and multiply its impact.
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In 2016's Missing, we meet Hunter just before he begins the case hinted at by the title, as he engages in one of the many tasks people seem to expect of uniformed police officers -- rescuing an animal. But before he and his partner Finlay Sinclair can finish their shift, they are called to a domestic disturbance that will soon spiral out of control due to the secrets being kept by the family and some incompetence on the part of his fellow officers. Douglas Ferguson has been shut out of his house by his wife following an accusation of sexual abuse by her daughter Stephanie. Stephanie seems uncooperative and her mother is even less help, so when the girl goes missing Hunter and a superior officer, Detective Sergeant Chantal Jain, face enormous pressure to find her and avoid the hailstorm of condemnation the department has coming for losing Stephanie in the first place.
James paints most of his color in his dialogue, peppering it heavily with expressions and lingo common to Edinburgh and other idioms used by their law enforcement. The dogged police work is the same as might be found in any precinct anywhere, but the different words and the ubiquitous closed-circuit television surveillance available to the officers sets these flatfeet apart from their stateside counterparts.
The final resolution of the mystery is a little convoluted and some mighty big coincidences link our characters to the case and to each other, but Missing still manages to open up a case so that the readers who look in can follow along despite some of the strange Scottish sayings he or she may encounter, and the characters draw enough interest to prompt some return visits.
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Atkins' roots in the South have helped some earlier books establish themselves with their authentic dialogue and atmosphere. But over the past two or three Colson books, he's let his local color setting run amok, dumping load after load of redneck lingo, vulgarity and unsophistication onto every page. The "local color" smothers, suffocates and drowns the tissue-thin Dukes of Hazzard rip-off plot until it falls apart like a cheap paper plate holding too much cobbler. Almost every character is a fount of backwoods -- and backwards -- simile, metaphor and vulgarisms that exhaust the reader and his or her patience long before we get anywhere close to a resolution of this padded and stretched-out narrative.
The Colson series didn't start like this, and Atkins seems to be able to avoid the pitfall in his continuation of Robert B. Parker's Spenser series. So I suppose the real mystery is why these last few books have gone so far overboard. Maybe Atkins feels like he needs to prove his grits-n-gravy bona fides after writing books set in Boston. Maybe he read some fan mail that approved of the style and took it too much to heart -- or maybe some that hated it and he decided to be ornery.
It's hard to say, and I don't really know. I'm starting to suspect that despite his rural Southern roots, Atkins has grown to dislike the region and its people, and is using this overlarded affectation of regional style to highlight that. Or perhaps he feels that they've gotten a little too much of a sympathetic hearing in recent years and figures folks should know what they're really like. A few characters seem to escape the flood and remain sympathetically realistic and free from Atkins' heavy hand of cornpone cussery. But they appear far too little and the relief is far too infrequent to save The Sinners.
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