THE RANGER (Quinn Colson #1) (audiobook) by Ace Atkins

Originally published in 2011.
Audiobook version published in 2022 by Recorded Books.
Read by MacLeod Andrews.
Duration: 8 hours, 36 minutes.
Unabridged.

Synopsis:

Quinn Colson is an Army Ranger at the end of his "storming the castle" days. He is in the process of transitioning to a role as a trainer of Army Rangers at Fort Benning, Georgia when he finds out that his Uncle has committed suicide.

So, Colson goes to Northern Mississippi for the funeral.

His uncle was the country sheriff and one of the deputies (a high school friend) tells Colson that she believes that it was a murder staged to look like a suicide. Colson doubts it. 

Meanwhile, word gets out that Colson will inherit all of his father's land, his house, and everything else. Colson starts to believe the deputy's theory of murder vs. suicide once he starts getting major pressure to dump the property as soon as possible to a shady county board member with a reputation of putting together shady deals.

So, Colson decides to stay a few more days to try to figure out what is going on. The more he digs, the worse it gets...

My Review:

First, the negatives:

*Colson knows EVERYBODY in this small county (except for the outsider bad guys). Like this character, I grew up in a rural area and left due to work. I have met literally hundreds of new people and I have tended to forget the ones that I left behind because I didn't see them any longer. Colson has been on active military duty in war zones for the majority of the 9 years and has met lots and lots of people and he still remembers every detail about everyone he knew. He must've been the most well-connected 18 year old in the county because he knows everyone. Someone will say something like, "Do you remember Jimmy?" and he will say sure - and ask if he still dyes his hair, works the morning shift at the gas station, likes ketchup on his scrambled eggs and drives a blue ford 4x4 with a white passenger door. C'mon. Also, yes, Jimmy still does all of these things 9 years later.

*The situation that caused Colson to come back to town would have worked out for the bad guys if they had just stayed patient for a few more days. It's weird that they didn't because they had spent years working on it.

*The first third of the book worked so hard to set a Southern Gothic mood that I almost quit at the 1 hour mark and the 2 hour mark. It was as if the author went down a checklist and tried to squeeze as many things in as soon as possible:

-Broken down homes? Check.

-People with eccentric hobbies or obsessions? Check.

-Grotesque characters? Check.

-Decayed surroundings? Check.

-The weight of the past upon the present? Check.

-Sinister events related to or stemming from poverty, alienation, crime or violence? Check, check, check and check. This is the plot of the book.

Positives: 

-In some books, when a person gets hit or shot it's no big deal and they get up and fight again even though they have a broken jaw or a punctured lung or their spine was severed. Not in this book. When someone gets shot or punched hard that injury stays with them.

-The conspiracy, when it is finally uncovered, makes a lot of sense and rings true.

-The reader of this book is excellent. He doesn't just read the book - he performs it. 

So, three really annoying things and three really good things. That's why I am rating this book 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Ranger (Quinn Colson #1) by Ace Atkins.