Shire grimaced. Only his best efforts, combined with certain assurances from Pappy Cade and promises from Little Rock of a further sweetening of tax arrangements, had kept Kovas from bolting to Texas after the Kerrigan killing. Another female corpse would lead to serious financial and reputational damage for all concerned.
-- John Connolly, The Dirty South (Atria, 2020)
Connolly's novels about Charlie Parker are among my favorite genre books and I have posted about others of them in 2015 (Jan 4, Nov 10) and 2018 (April 3, Oct. 18). The Dirty South takes place in Arkansas in the 90's, a flashback to when Parker is still looking for the murderer of his wife and daughter. He follows clues to Cargil, Arkansas, where out of a moral obligation he stays for a time to help investigate the murder of three Black girls. The town is small and impoverished and controlled by the Cade family, who are trying to downplay the murder investigations in order to lure a big company to a poor town in which some people will get rich. Cargil is full of redneck characters who do all they can to hinder Parker's relationship with independent police chief Evander Griffin, though Parker does get help from some of the few decent people left in the town; most of the decent population had left long ago. When Parker's life is threatened he brings in his loyal and violent assistants, Angel and Louie. Parker helps solve the murders and moves on to Mississippi, looking for whoever killed his family.
Connolly does an excellent job of creating the details and denizens of Cargil, as well as the racial attitudes and class antagonisms of the South. Every character has hopes and dreams as well as nightmares, in a town that many find impossible to escape,
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