Pickard County Atlas
A Novel
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4.0 • 22 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In this atmospheric debut, small-town secrets and the aftershocks of crime threaten to set a Nebraskan community ablaze.
In a dusty town in Nebraska's rugged sandhills, weary sheriff's deputy Harley Jensen patrols the streets at night, on the lookout for something—anything—out of the ordinary. It's July 1978, and the heat is making people ornery, restless. That and the Reddick family patriarch has decided, decades after authorities ended the search for his murdered boy's body, to lay a headstone. Instead of bringing closure, this decision is the spark that threatens to engulf Pickard County.
On a fateful night after the memorial service, Harley tails the youngest Reddick and town miscreant, Paul, through the abandoned farms and homes outside their run-down town. The pursuit puts Harley in the path of Pam Reddick, a restless young woman looking for escape, bent on cutting the ties of motherhood and marriage. Filled with desperate frustration, Pam is drawn to Harley's dark history, not unlike that of her husband, Rick—a man raised in the wreckage of a brother's violent death and a mother's hardened fury.
Unfolding over six tense days, Pickard County Atlas sets Harley and the Reddicks on a collision course—propelling them toward an incendiary moment that will either redeem or end them. Engrossing, darkly funny, and authentically rendered, Chris Harding Thornton's rural noir rings with a nuanced sense of place even as it hums with menace, introducing an astonishing new voice in literary crime fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Thornton's impressive debut, a hard-edged noir set in 1978 Nebraska, Pickard County deputy sheriff Harley Jensen has to deal with an unresolved case involving the missing body of a murdered child. In 1960, seven-year-old Dell Reddick startled farmhand Rollie Asher, a Korean War vet suffering from PTSD, who lashed out with a shovel, crushing the boy's skull. Asher phoned the sheriff to report what he'd done, but neglected to say where he put the body before blowing out his brains. Despite Jensen's dogged efforts at the time, the remains were never found, and the open wound shaped the subsequent lives of the boy's family members. Whatever healing took place in the years since is threatened by Dell's father's decision in 1978 to finally erect a headstone for his son, even though he doesn't know the body's location. Jensen gets enmeshed in the lives of the Reddick family as he crosses paths repeatedly with Dell's younger brother, Paul, who may be involved with drugs and arson, and becomes emotionally involved with the wife of Dell's other brother, Rick. The gut punch of an ending is satisfyingly bleak and an appropriate match for the book's downbeat tone. Thornton's superior gift for evocative prose ("The glare blotted out all else. North-central Nebraska, the spot where sand met loam, rose and fell around him, cast black against the shadow of sky") augurs well for her next work. Fans of Lou Berney will be pleased.
