TONY BURKE speaks to Gambian kora player SUNTOU SUSSO
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Crime Fiction with Mat Coward: October 2, 2022
New titles from Ace Atkins, TM Logan, Chris Nickson and Helen Monks Takhar
MARIA DUARTE recommends a british boxing biopic about the stormy relationship between Nazeem Hamed and his trainer Brendan Ingle
ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review Good Night, and Good Luck: Live from Broadway, Becoming Victoria Wood, Hamnet, and Song Sung Blue
CHRIS SEARLE speaks to Filipino-US saxophonist JON IRABAGON about the threat of AI in the time of Musk and Trump, and how an artist can respond
PETE HIRST introduces a theatre company from Wakefield dedicated to the propagation of socialist perspectives on present British political realities
JENNY FARRELL reminds us that the US novelist, famed for pulp fiction and nature stories, was, by virtue of life experience, a committed revolutionary socialist
THE HEATHENS by Ace Atkins (Corsair, £9.99) is the latest in the series about Sheriff Quinn Colson, whose bailiwick is a rural county in Mississippi. When a local white women is murdered, opinion in town is that her rumbustious teenage daughter did it, possibly in cahoots with her boyfriend, who is not only a petty villain, but black as well.
The young couple go on the lam in a series of stolen cars, leaving the sheriff, who’s pretty sure they’re not guilty, to catch them before they manage to get themselves killed.
Brutal, shocking, suspenseful and funny, there’s always a whiff of the freak show about these books, with almost every character being a grotesque or an eccentric, living in a land that seems to be 200 years behind the rest of the world.
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