Got this one from Mark several years ago, and finally pulled it off the shelf. Its the story of life in a small shrimping town in the Louisiana bayou after a BP Oil spill has decimated the waters. It shows how an eclectic cast of characters gets by. From a one-armed shrimper who is obsessed with finding pirate treasure, to a set of sketchy twins growing "something" out in the swamp, to the company man from BP trying to get everyone in town to sign a settlement agreement. This was a fun read. If anyone wants it, I'm happy to send it to you. ( )

What a debut! Cooper introduces a host of salty, well-delineated characters, and it's fun to see how they'll intersect, because you just know they will. The book is not really plot-driven, it's definitely a character driven novel, and what characters.
Cooper's evocative descriptions of the Louisiana swamp country is worth the price of admission alone. But it's also laugh out loud funny in several places, and quite moving in other places, and grimly violent in others. I love when a book (or movie) can suddenly shift in mood and tone believably, it makes for an unpredictable experience. In that regard, it reminds me of Skippy Dies by Paul Murray. Definitely looking forward to the next novel from Tom Cooper. ( )

I really loved the dichotomy between the filthy language used in dialogue and beautiful writing that set the scenes and moved the story along. The characters were well-developed and interesting, and the ending was oddly satisfying. ( )

Etrange, fascinant, magnifique ! ( )

A little over five years has passed since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and lower Louisiana. Bayou residents are feeling the effects of the BP Deepwater Horizon Explosion and Oil Spill. BP says the oil hasn’t hurt the environment, but the shrimpers and the other fisherman know better. They are barely, barely eeking out a living.
Author Tom Cooper’s first novel centers around seven characters with a setting in the bayous and swamps of Barataria and the small town of Jeanette, basically suburbs of New Orleans. First there are the Toup brothers. Identical twins Reginald and Victor are drug dealers with a rather large field of marijuana growing on of the remote islands in the swamp. They do whatever they need to do keep their secret safe, even if it involves murder and stealing a man’s prosthetic arm to keep in him line.
Then readers are introduced to Gus Lindquist. A one-armed, OxyContin-dependent shrimper, he is about to give up on shrimping. As the shrimp dwindle in the oil-soaked waters, Lindquist re-focuses his attention on a boyhood dream: searching the swamp for pirate Jean Lafitte’s long-lost treasure.
Next come Cosgrove and Hanson, two petty criminals who meet doing community service. They desperately seeking any get-rich, half-brained idea they come across. There’s the teenager Wes Trench, eighteen years-old and still reeling from his mother’s death during Katrina. Finally, there is the BP middleman, Brady Grimes, who is trying to get the residents of the area to take BP’s meager settlement offer. Until he has to face his own mother.
Cooper weaves the stories; each character or set of characters acting out a mini-novel of their own, but as the stories merge, something more sinister and dangerous begins to appear. At times hilarious and at others deeply profound, the novel is compulsive reading. I was eager to learn what kind of mess(es) these good ol’ boys could get themselves into.
I received this novel for free from Blogging for Books in exchange for this review.
I give The Marauders 5 out of 5 stars. ( )