Mick Hardin is an Army CID officer home on leave, recovering from an IED attack, when a body is found in the centre of town. It’s Barney Kissick, the local heroin dealer, and the city police see his death as an occupational hazard. But when Barney’s mother, Shifty, asks Mick to take a look, it seems there’s more to the killing than it appears. Mick should be rehabbing his leg, signing his divorce papers and getting out of town – and most of all, staying out of the way of his sister Linda’s reelection as Sheriff – but he keeps on looking, and suddenly he’s getting shot at himself.
A dark, pacy crime novel about grief and revenge, with surprises hidden below the surface, Shifty’s Boys is a tour de force that confirms Chris Offutt’s Mick Hardin as one of the most appealing new investigators in fiction.
- ‘This is what Jack Reacher wants to be when he grows up’ – A TIMES THRILLER OF THE YEAR
- Army-cop-turned-small-town-investigator Mick Hardin returns to the Kentucky hills in this vividly atmospheric thriller from acclaimed novelist Chris Offutt
- The Killing Hills has been longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger
- The second instalment of a brand new crime series that burst on to the scene in 2021 with The Killing Hills (3K copies sold) which was selected as a Times and Sunday Times Thriller of the Year and an Irish Times Crime Book of the Year
- Perfect for readers of Daniel Woodrell, Willy Vlautin, Michael Farris Smith, Joe Lansdale And James Sallis, and for fans of Mare of Easttown starring Kate Winslet
- Author awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Whiting Writers Award, Pushcart Prize and American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award. In 2020, his novel Country Dark won the Prix de Beaune and the Prix Mystère de la Critique for Best Foreign Novel in France
- ‘These books are as thrilling and funny as a great crime show yet still exhibit the scraped, lean vernacular sentences readers of Offutt’s short fiction have come to admire. Here’s hoping Hardin rides for a good long while’ – Jonathan Lethem, author of The Arrest, on Shifty’s Boys
- ‘If Lee Child and Daniel Woodrell collaborated on a hillbilly noir, the result would probably read a lot like this: tough, laconic, emotionally engaging and blackly funny, The Killing Hills makes for a very satisfying read’- Irish Times (Crime Books of the Year)
