Dead Run - Softcover

Atkins, Leo

3.75

12 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0425177777 ISBN 13: 9780425177778

Publisher: Berkley, 2000

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When Benella Sweet foils a robbery in which six innocent people were killed, she finds that she has been targeted by a vicious gang seeking revenge and enlists the aid of private detective Connor Gibbs to find the culprits and save her life.

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Review:

Penzler Pick, January 2001: Creating a character who works to right wrongdoing below the Mason-Dixon Line--in places where everyone's related and where the ugliest skeletons can never be buried deep enough--is an honorable tradition. From Melville Davisson Post and his Virginia-based Uncle Abner stories to James Lee Burke and his Louisiana paladin, Dave Robicheaux, the writer of Southern mysteries is able to mine a rich vein of home-fried evil.

Leo Atkins's hero, Connor Gibbs, runs a private investigations agency, Quixote Enterprises, in Wendover, a small North Carolina city. Here, before too many pages of Dead Run are turned, a well-attended burial takes place. Few funerals are welcome, but this one is particularly tragic: a young father has been slain while successfully protecting his young daughter from a sudden rain of bullets fired in a local diner. Five innocent people were left dead after a particularly nasty gang of bank robbers panicked. Then, with a well-placed shot, Benella Mae Sweet, Connor Gibbs's longtime lady friend, managed to bring down one of the fleeing villains for a total of six dead.

But the plot does not turn on what the innocent victims' survivors experience as a result of their horrible loss. Instead, Atkins hinges his tale on the escalation of the stakes when the dead villain's very mean buddies decide to seek revenge--by teaching Benella a lethal lesson. Now Benella weighs in at about 170 and doesn't scare easily, so vengeance is not as simple a matter as it sounds, though the combined efforts of the sheriff's office, the FBI, and Connor all vying to help protect her seem to have the effect of canceling each other out.

Writing as Leo Atkins, Clay Harvey (who under his own name is the author of the Tyler Vance series) resembles some near-unimaginable blending of Joe R. Lansdale and Margaret Maron. The air of folksy neighborliness makes for just a little icing on the basic tough foundation: these grits are boiled rock hard. --Otto Penzler

Review:

Lovingly crafted and full of fun surprises. -- Publishers Weekly

[Atkins] creates believable, complex characters to populate his believable, complex world.-Washington Times -- Washington Times

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