As someone who’s never been to America’s south, I only know what I read in books: lots of diners, folks who don’t like the look of you, and dirt tracks where any manner of thing can go wrong. And I love it, that southern tale: the heat, the secrets, something about the writing that is sweet and sour like ripe old candy. It surprised me to realise that Reynolds was British, so accurate were the landscapes and characters; but I didn’t really mind. How could I? I loved it. It’s set in 1946 but it could be set today: murders and shifty town politics and reporters out of a job and red-headed dames – three of them no less. (I’m almost certain there are more red headed women in fiction than there are in reality.)

After a temper tantrum involving a typewriter through an office window, reporter Charlie Yates is sent away from his beloved New York to Texarkana on the Texas–Arkansas border, where a suspected killer is on the loose. His brief is: cover this or lose your job, but you’ll probably lose it anyway. And Yates’s reputation precedes him, with no help from his fellow reporters apart from being threatened with a gun, and the police with a stick up their collective ass about him too. But as Charlie’s priorities change from keeping his job to solving a crime in a place where the authorities seem less than concerned about it, he’ll figure out who to trust – and that’s about no one beyond himself. Charlie comes from a place of unexpected emotional depth, wounded from the loss of his wife, his sobriety, and his self-respect. Along with a gruesome and complex plot and the neat little quirks of language that shine the shoes of the story, putting it in its historical place, the rediscovery of Charlie’s moral core is a journey worth taking with him.

Fiona Hardy