STEVE ANDREW enjoys an account of the many communities that flourished independently of and in resistance to the empires of old
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Crime Fiction with Mat Coward: October 2, 2022
New titles from Ace Atkins, TM Logan, Chris Nickson and Helen Monks Takhar
TOM STONE urges you to catch the last dates of a New York singer/songwriter, never afraid to challenge her audiences musically or politically
JAN WOOLF examines work that aims to give viewers a material experience of the environments in the polar north and Britain equally affected by the climate crisis
The bard recalls advice received 50 years ago from his TRB muse, and sorts out appropriate legislation for football club ownership
MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE review Facing War, Kontinental ’25, Bugonia, and Relay
MAYER WAKEFIELD is frustrated by a production of Ibsen’s classic study of an anti-heroine that fails to elucidate her motivations
PETER MASON tunes his ear into the domestic affairs of a Carribbean couple with a troublesome son
THE HEATHENS by Ace Atkins (Corsair, £9.99) is the latest in the series about Sheriff Quinn Colson, whose bailiwick is a rural county in Mississippi. When a local white women is murdered, opinion in town is that her rumbustious teenage daughter did it, possibly in cahoots with her boyfriend, who is not only a petty villain, but black as well.
The young couple go on the lam in a series of stolen cars, leaving the sheriff, who’s pretty sure they’re not guilty, to catch them before they manage to get themselves killed.
Brutal, shocking, suspenseful and funny, there’s always a whiff of the freak show about these books, with almost every character being a grotesque or an eccentric, living in a land that seems to be 200 years behind the rest of the world.
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