The Sinners

Bestseller Atkins’s solid if relatively uneventful eighth novel set in Mississippi’s Tibbehah County (after 2017’s The Fallen) finds Sheriff Quinn Colson, a former Army Ranger, preparing for his wedding, but first he must handle a murder inquiry resulting from a power struggle between rival drug trafficking operations. Fannie Hathcock, who runs a strip bar called Vienna Place, is concerned that the Pritchard brothers, Tyler and Cody, her ostensible business partners, aren’t being straight with her. Fannie sends a trusted employee, 20-year-old African-American Ordeen Davis, to check out the Pritchards’ property when she believes it to be unoccupied. Unfortunately, Tyler and Cody’s uncle Heath, a racist ex-con who’s been jailed for selling marijuana, is on hand to spot Ordeen and shoot him in the back. Davis’s mother, an old friend of Quinn’s family, beseeches the sheriff to get justice for her son. Not a whole lot of interest follows. The entry works best as a long setup for major developments promised for book nine. [em]Author tour. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM. (July) [/em]