Redneck skullduggery fuels action in ‘The Redeemers’

G.P. Putnam’s Sons

384 pages, $26.95

Jericho, a little north Mississippi town in Tibbehah County, is a double predestination of corn-fed mayhem. Once a thriving lumber mill and railroad hub, it’s now a “busted-ass place 90 miles from Memphis and too damn close to Tupelo.”

In Ace Atkins’ “The Redeemers,” Jericho business has been to the benefit of local kingpin Johnny Stagg, proprietor of the Rebel Truck Stop and an adjacent strip-joint, the Booby Trap. “We bait it,” says Stagg, “and they come on in.” His Dockers and tasseled loafers may mark him as a “Southern gentleman,” but to outgoing sheriff Quinn Colson, the “prismatic” Stagg is a ruthless “businessman” who puts the arch back in nemesis.

Even on Sherriff Colson’s last day in office, the country-boy hero is still out stalking the picturesque sublime. “I’m not leaving,” Quinn declares, “till I make things right.” What Quinn really enjoys is the patrol, “running the back roads of his county, checking on folks, keeping the world in order.”

Good luck with that, given the likes of Mr. Johnny T. Stagg.

“The Redeemers,” which follows “The Forsaken” (2014), has two plot lines that eventually circle back on themselves with a high-stakes showdown in the nearby National Forest, west of Jericho.

With its comical dimension, the screwball heist is the better story. Mickey Walls, owner of a Jericho carpeting firm (Walls Flooring), wants to get even with his father-in-law, Larry Cobb, who has “rebuked his honor.” He enlists a dubious crew, including two Alabama thieves: Uncle Peewee Sparks and Chase Clanton, Peewee’s punk nephew.

Disguised as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the gang destroys a wing of the Cobb manor with a forklift and makes off with Cobb’s massive strongbox containing $900,000 and documents implicating Cobb and Johnny Stagg in various criminal conspiracies, all the way up to the state level. As Stagg scrambles, his Mississippi puppet masters in Jackson are obliged to send in a mysterious intimidator named The Trooper to conduct damage control with his .50 caliber Barrett shoulder cannon. (Caution: this isn’t the Trooper’s first appearance in the Colson books.)

In the parallel narrative, Quinn and his sidekick deputy Lillie Virgil rescue his younger sister Caddy, who has become a strung-out junkie living in Memphis. As a girl, Caddy was molested by a game warden, who was, of course, immediately shot dead and buried by Quinn, a warrior even at age 10. Compounding her childhood trauma, Caddy’s evangelist boyfriend has recently been gunned down by an unknown assailant, probably a sniper. In Tibbehah County, revenge is a dish best served medium rare, then sent back to the kitchen, so there is sure be a reckoning for this bloody outrage in the “Big Woods” finale.

With its reliance on redneck skullduggery, “The Redeemers” is fairly male-centric in its orientation, so it’s intriguing that the best (and hippest) character is a woman. “Bad stuff is like tar,” Lillie Virgil says, “It’s hard to wash off.” A “starshooter on the Old Miss Rifle Team,” Deputy Virgil has no problem building character with the business end of a weapon, and she is a substantial foil for the sometimes plywood-ian Quinn. (“A man’s never too good for his family.”)

Presently residing in Oxford, series creator Ace Atkins has had an impressive career. He was a gridiron star for the Auburn Tigers earlier in the ’90s — this should not be held against him. He began as a crime reporter for the Tampa Tribune, where he was nominated for a Pulitzer. Atkins is now a small industrial concern as much as he is an author, having published 17 titles since 1998, including several authorized extensions of Robert B. Parker’s popular Spenser series, all of them landing one after another on top of the high velocity convoy of the Quinn Colson sagas.

Colson spent 10 years and 13 (!) deployments “running and gunning in Trashcanistan.” And all for what? “The voters send you packing anyway.” He falls into the line of modern action heroes beginning with the film “Billy Jack” (1971), soldiers who return from conflict and chaos on the fringe of empire, only to discover that, when it comes to people not doing right, there’s just as much trouble on the home front as there is in the jungle or the sand.

In “The Redeemers,” Atkins hustles along his involved plots like a bug-eyed trail boss. His narrator sometimes leaps from behind the hedge to join the hayseed fun — an unnecessary, if minor irritation — but his deliberate “story-telling” prose is peppered with oddly arresting images. (“You could hear the branches clicking together like bottle trees.”)

And “The Redeemers” secondary characters are among his best: K-Bo and Short Box, identical twins who own a hot wings restaurant near Graceland; Ringold, a former U.S. Army Ranger like Quinn who turns out to be a mole for the Feds, his arms “sleeve tattoos of skulls, daggers, and maps of places on the other side of the earth”; the obese Peewee, who considers his nasty van to be a “rolling sex palace,” old Playboy centerfolds shellacked to the ceiling.

If there can be no truce with Satan’s minions in Jericho, perhaps there can be an unstable reconciliation of opposites between Stagg and Colson. “Don’t you realize I was the one who kept (expletive) order?” Stagg pleads. “I kept the barbarians at the gate.” Meanwhile, there’s trouble brewing down at the Indian casino, and, of course, there’s the damnable “Mexican cartel,” encroaching. Maybe it’s time former Sherriff Quinn Colson takes his own sound advice on proper foresting: “Walk soft.”