The Reluctant Sheriff by Chris Offutt

March 22, 2025

Chris Offutt’s Mick Hardin novels have their ups and downs for me. I loved the first in the series, The Killing Hills, and then I seem to appreciate all the odd-numbered ones more than the even ones. The Reluctant Sheriff is the fourth to feature Mick Hardin, an...

They All Fall the Same by Wes Browne

January 07, 2025

Wes Browne brings back cannabis dealer Burl Spoon from Hillbilly Hustle in a vicious, cruel novel. When two drug dealers in Kentucky go to war in They All Fall the Same, they don’t care who gets hurt or what gets destroyed. Burl Spoon controls his empire in...

Code of the Hills by Chris Offutt

June 13, 2023

Mick Hardin is back! Code of the Hills is Chris Offutt’s third novel featuring Hardin, a product of the Kentucky hills. Offutt’s writing style is economical in these books, but it’s beautiful and descriptive, and the reader never doubts that Offutt...

Shifty’s Boys by Chris Offutt

June 05, 2022

Chris Offutt’s The Killing Hills was one of my favorite books last year. He continues Mick Hardin’s story in Shifty’s Boys, another compelling novel set in the hills of eastern Kentucky. While Mick is much the same, and the writing is still poetic...

The Killing Hills by Chris Offutt

June 14, 2021

The last book I read that used language so beautifully, so sparingly, and created such a vivid picture of a place, was James Anderson’s The Never-Open Desert Diner. Chris Offutt’s The Killing Hills takes readers into rural Kentucky with a hero whose story...