This book is Outstanding white trash Hillbilly southern noir.
Richard a pastor at the largest church in the county is the only character who isn’t white trash. Instead he is a conservative hypocrite with murky sexual proclivities.
This was a great book.
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Effective, though not particularly believable, story of a Baptist preacher who is being blackmailed in a small Arkansas town. The narrative shifts between most of the main characters (and the audiobook uses multiple narrators to good effect) as events start to spiral out of control until the "shocking!" conclusion. The individual scenes here stand out more than the overall plot, and the attempt to weave in the run-up to the 2016 Presidential election, with talk of Trump vs. Cruz in the primary, seems tacked on and just a shorthand to stereotype a character or two, such as the preacher's oldest son. The younger characters are ultimately the more interesting ones--and the more sympathetic ones as well, despite their criminal actions. ( )

Interesting and yet very predictable. Especially the last few chapters. At least the characters were written with depth even if all of them were completely unlikable. ( )

A small town preacher in Arkansas is being blackmailed. He's at the forefront of the fight to prevent a referendum on whether the county should remain dry and so he makes an offer to the man with the most to lose if the vote doesn't happen, a man hoping to open a liquor store in town. He, in turn, decides to get the money by stealing it from a shady businessman.

If you like your crime novels noir, your characters compromised and plenty of things going wrong, you'll love this one. Hinkson's spare writing style suits the subject matter, and he manages to make each of his many characters surprisingly complex and nuanced. Taking place during the 2016 presidential primaries, Hinkson makes even the tertiary characters feel like actual people, no small task when writing about desperate people willing to do just about anything to protect what's theirs, or to escape to a better life. In this novel, the most sympathetic characters are the pair of blackmailers who set a whole series of crimes and disasters in motion. It's a well-told story that has a ton of tension and a very satisfying ending. I'm excited to read more from this author. ( )