Johnny remembered a story from the Bible when the lame and the sick gathered around a pool where an angel would stir the surface and whoever reached the water first would be healed. Except it never seemed to work. The casino felt like that, desperate people huddled and hoping for a miracle, day after day.
I’ve been raving about Alan Lee’s Mackenzie August/Sinatra novels, telling you how much fun they are. But those books didn’t prepare me for his Atlanta Burning series, two books released to date. This new series raises the stakes, takes it to a whole new level. I call it genuinely epic. Think of a fusion of the classic Western story with a Mad Max postapocalyptic thriller. With a Christian element artfully woven in. The first book is The Wild South.
This is the setting: Atlanta in the present, or maybe a few years into the future. The place has become a dystopia. Police defunding has resulted in rampant crime, the authorities helpless. In response, the government has instituted radical, controversional new rules – bounties will be placed on the worst criminals at large, and licensed bounty hunters will be permitted arrest them. Licenses aren’t hard to get. Every sane person can tell the results will be horrific.
Our hero, Johnathan “Johnny Sugar” Young, is not much interested in all that. He’s a Georgia celebrity, thanks to his college football career, in which he led his team to two Sugar Bowls, even though he quit before graduation and never even tried out for professional ball. He was a cop for a while and even took FBI training – but he quit that too. Today he’s a professional gambler, playing high stakes poker at an Atlanta casino.
He lives in the upper story of a commercial building he owns. His roommate is Kunga, a former criminal who once stabbed him with a knife, but then was born again and changed his ways. He’s now Johnny’s best friend.
Because the police only respond to emergencies nowadays, Johnny has to call in a private crime scene investigator when his property is robbed. The investigator turns out to be Bella Adams, the love of Johnny’s life, whom he hasn’t seen in years. She’s still mad at him for leaving college (and her). She tells him she’s a licensed bounty hunter, and has plans to go after her chunk of the reward money when the season opens. She knows Johnny’s skills, both as a cop and a gunman (he’s a natural), and she asks him to become her partner. Learning she has lost her apartment, he invites her to move in with him and Kunga. Thus begins an awkward but increasingly affectionate partnership.
It’s quite a ride. There’s violence here, of course, but there’s also increasing personal insight, and prophecy, and acts of heroism, and a remarkable final showdown unlike anything I’ve ever read before. I couldn’t wait to download the second book, Hell For Leather
Continue reading ‘The Wild South’ and ‘Hell for Leather,’ by Alan Lee