Chris Offutt – författare

Riveting, often heartbreaking stories that take readers through country that is figuratively and literally unmapped. These stories are set in a nameless community too small to be called a town, a place where wanting an education is a mark of ungodly arrogance and dowsing for water a legitimate occupation. Offutt has received a James Michener Grant and a Kentucky Arts Council Award.From the Trade Paperback edition.

** LONGLISTED FOR THE CWA GOLD DAGGER ** Mick Hardin, a combat veteran now working as an Army CID agent, is home on a leave that is almost done. His wife is about to give birth, but they aren't getting along. His sister, newly risen to sheriff, has just landed her first murder case, and local politicians are pushing for city police or the FBI to take the case. Are they convinced she can't handle it, or is there something else at work? She calls on Mick who, with his homicide investigation experience and familiarity with the terrain, is well-suited to staying under the radar. As he delves into the investigation, he dodges his commanding officer's increasingly urgent calls while attempting to head off further murders. And he needs to talk to his wife.The Killing Hills is a novel of betrayal - sexual, personal, within and between the clans that populate the hollers - and the way it so often shades into violence. Chris Offutt has delivered a dark, witty, and absolutely compelling novel of murder and honor, with an investigator-hero unlike any in fiction.

LONGLISTED FOR THE CWA GOLD DAGGERMick Hardin, a combat veteran now working as an Army CID agent, is home on a leave that is almost done. His wife is about to give birth, but they aren''t getting along. His sister, newly risen to sheriff, has just landed her first murder case, and local politicians are pushing for city police or the FBI to take the case. Are they convinced she can''t handle it, or is there something else at work? She calls on Mick who, with his homicide investigation experience and familiarity with the terrain, is well-suited to staying under the radar. As he delves into the investigation, he dodges his commanding officer''s increasingly urgent calls while attempting to head off further murders. And he needs to talk to his wife.The Killing Hills is a novel of betrayal - sexual, personal, within and between the clans that populate the hollers - and the way it so often shades into violence. Chris Offutt has delivered a dark, witty, and absolutely compelling novel of murder and honor, with an investigator-hero unlike any in fiction.

Mick Hardin is an Army CID officer home on leave, recovering from an IED attack, when a body is found in the centre of town. It's Barney Kissick, the local heroin dealer, and the city police see his death as an occupational hazard. But when Barney's mother, Shifty, asks Mick to take a look, it seems there's more to the killing than it appears. Mick should be rehabbing his leg, signing his divorce papers and getting out of town - and most of all, staying out of the way of his sister Linda's reelection as Sheriff - but he keeps on looking, and suddenly he's getting shot at himself.A dark, pacy crime novel about grief and revenge, with surprises hidden below the surface, Shifty's Boys is a tour de force that confirms Chris Offutt's Mick Hardin as one of the most appealing new investigators in fiction.

Mick Hardin is an Army CID officer home on leave, recovering from an IED attack, when a body is found in the centre of town. It''s Barney Kissick, the local heroin dealer, and the city police see his death as an occupational hazard. But when Barney''s mother, Shifty, asks Mick to take a look, it seems there''s more to the killing than it appears. Mick should be rehabbing his leg, signing his divorce papers and getting out of town - and most of all, staying out of the way of his sister Linda''s reelection as Sheriff - but he keeps on looking, and suddenly he''s getting shot at himself.A dark, pacy crime novel about grief and revenge, with surprises hidden below the surface, Shifty''s Boys is a tour de force that confirms Chris Offutt''s Mick Hardin as one of the most appealing new investigators in fiction.

FROM AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR CHRIS OFFUTT.'Excellent Kentucky noir — Offutt's third Mick Hardin novel is the best yet.' — KirkusAn explosive return to the mayhem of the Kentucky hills, Code of the Hills is a harrowing novel of family — of what we’re willing to do to protect and avenge the ones we love.Mick Hardin is back in the hills of Kentucky. He’d planned to touch down briefly before heading to France, marking the end to his twenty-year Army career.In Rocksalt, his sister Linda the sheriff is investigating the murder of Pete Lowe, a sought-after mechanic at the local racetrack. After another body is found, Linda and her deputy Johnny Boy Tolliver wonder if the two murders are related.Linda steps into harm’s way just as a third body turns up and Mick ends up being deputised again.The dark, gripping, and propulsive thriller of murder and secrets in Rocksalt, Kentucky where little is as it seems.'This is a marvellous series… These have become must-reads for me and I enjoy every minute of the reading experience' Deadly Pleasures'Beautifully descriptive... Offutt’s Mick Hardin novels are powerful books that feature characters with questionable ethics.' Library Journal'Righteous Kentucky noir... I gulped it down, relishing the burn' — Ian Rankin on Shifty’s Boys

FROM AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR CHRIS OFFUTT.'Excellent Kentucky noir — Offutt's third Mick Hardin novel is the best yet.' — KirkusAn explosive return to the mayhem of the Kentucky hills, Code of the Hills is a harrowing novel of family — of what we’re willing to do to protect and avenge the ones we love.Mick Hardin is back in the hills of Kentucky. He’d planned to touch down briefly before heading to France, marking the end to his twenty-year Army career.In Rocksalt, his sister Linda the sheriff is investigating the murder of Pete Lowe, a sought-after mechanic at the local racetrack. After another body is found, Linda and her deputy Johnny Boy Tolliver wonder if the two murders are related.Linda steps into harm’s way just as a third body turns up and Mick ends up being deputised again.The dark, gripping, and propulsive thriller of murder and secrets in Rocksalt, Kentucky where little is as it seems.'This is a marvellous series… These have become must-reads for me and I enjoy every minute of the reading experience' Deadly Pleasures'Beautifully descriptive... Offutt’s Mick Hardin novels are powerful books that feature characters with questionable ethics.' Library Journal'Righteous Kentucky noir... I gulped it down, relishing the burn' — Ian Rankin on Shifty’s Boys

From the critically acclaimed author of the novel The Good Brother and memoir My Father the Pornographer, Same River Twice is the second volume from an American literary star. “If you haven''t read Chris Offutt, you''ve missed an accomplished and compelling writer” (Chicago Tribune).At the age of nineteen, Chris Offutt had already been rejected by the army, the Peace Corps, the park rangers, and the police. So he left his home in the Kentucky Appalachians and thumbed his way north—into a series of odd jobs and even stranger encounters with his fellow Americans. Fifteen years later, Offutt finds himself in a place he never thought he’d be: settled down with a pregnant wife. Writing from the banks of the Iowa River, where he came to rest, he intersperses the story of his youthful journeys with that of his journey to fatherhood in a memoir that is uniquely candid, occasionally brutal, and often wonderfully funny. As he reckons with the comforts and terrors of maturity, Offutt finally discovers what is best in life and in himself.

From the critically acclaimed author of the novel The Good Brother and memoir My Father the Pornographer, Out of the Woods is Chris Offutt’s fiercely original short story collection the New York Times calls “a magical book”.Arriving seven years after Offutt’s debut collection Kentucky Straight, Out of the Woods returns a masterly writer to the form which garnered him not only critical praise but many prestigious awards. Offutt, who “draws landscape and constructs dialogue with the eyes and ears of a native son” (The Miami Herald), is on strong home turf here, capturing those who have left the Kentucky hills and long to return. These nine stories of gravediggers and drifters, gamblers and truck drivers a long way from home, are tales so full of hard edges they can''t help but tell some hard truths.

From the critically acclaimed author of the collection Kentucky Straight and memoir My Father the Pornographer, The Good Brother is the finely crafted debut novel from a talent the New York Times calls “a fierce writer”.Virgil Caudill has never gone looking for trouble, but this time he''s got no choice—his hell-raising brother Boyd has been murdered. Everyone knows who did it, and in the hills of Kentucky, tradition won’t let a murder go unavenged. No matter which way he chooses, Virgil will lose. The Good Brother is the story of a man’s struggle to find his real self in the wake of an impossible choice. Traversing the American landscape from the hollows of Eastern Kentucky to the plains of Montana, Offutt explores the hunger for belonging that drives our most passionate beliefs, and in the process shows himself to be one of our most powerful storytellers.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR After inheriting 400 novels of pornography written by his father in the 1970s and ‘80s, critically acclaimed author Chris Offutt sets out to make sense of a complicated father-son relationship in this carefully observed, beautifully written memoir.“Chris Offutt owns one of the finest, surest prose styles around, ready and able to convey the hardest truth without flinching. Now Offutt enters the darkest and most mysterious of places—the cave of a monstrous enigma named Andrew J. Offutt—armed with nothing but his own restless curiosity. Spoiler alert: He makes it out alive, walking into the daylight to bring us a deeper, funnier, more tender and more heartbroken truth—and his masterpiece.” —Michael Chabon When Andrew Offutt died, his son, Chris, inherited a desk, a rifle, and eighteen hundred pounds of pornographic fiction. Andrew had been considered the “king of twentieth-century smut,” with a writing career that began as a strategy to pay for his son’s orthodontic needs and soon took on a life of its own, peaking during the 1970s when the commercial popularity of the erotic novel reached its height. With his dutiful wife serving as typist, Andrew wrote from their home in the Kentucky hills, locked away in an office no one dared intrude upon. In this fashion he wrote more than four hundred novels, including pirate porn, ghost porn, zombie porn, and secret agent porn. The more he wrote, the more intense his ambition became and the more difficult it was for his children to be part of his world. Over the long summer of 2013, Chris returned to his hometown to help his widowed mother move out of his childhood home. As he began to examine his father’s manuscripts and memorabilia, journals, and letters, he realized he finally had an opportunity to gain insight into the difficult, mercurial, sometimes cruel man he’d loved and feared in equal measure. Only in his father’s absence could he truly make sense of the man and his legacy. In My Father, the Pornographer, Offutt takes us on the journey with him, reading his father’s prodigious literary output as both a critic and as a son seeking answers. This is a book about the life of a working writer who supports his family solely by the output of his typewriter; it’s about the awful psychic burdens one generation unthinkingly passes along to the next; and it’s about growing up in the Appalachian hills with a pack of fearless boys riding bicycles through the woods, happy and free.

From the critically acclaimed author of the novel The Good Brother and memoir My Father the Pornographer comes the unforgettable memoir No Heroes. “If you haven’t read Chris Offutt, you’ve missed an accomplished and compelling writer” (Chicago Tribune).In his fortieth year, Chris Offutt returns to his alma mater, Morehead State University, the only four-year school in the Kentucky hills. He envisions leading the modest life of a teacher and father. Yet present-day reality collides painfully with memory, leaving Offutt in the midst of an adventure he never imagined: the search for a home that no longer exists. Interwoven with this bittersweet homecoming tale are the wartime stories of Offutt’s parents-in-law, Arthur and Irene. An unlikely friendship develops between the eighty-year-old Polish Jew and the forty-year-old Kentucky hillbilly as Arthur and Offutt share comfort in exile, reliving the past at a distance. With masterful prose, Offutt combines these disparate accounts to create No Heroes, a profound meditation on family, home, the Holocaust, and history.

Master storyteller Chris Offutt’s acclaimed crime series has been praised by Ian Rankin as “righteous Kentucky noir with top notes of Daniel Woodrell and S. A. Cosby,” and in this breakneck new novel, sheriff Mick Hardin navigates the treacherous terrain of a town’s festering secrets and the violent forces who want to keep them hidden.Lauded as a “masterclass in the craft of crime fiction” (CrimeReads), Chris Offutt’s beloved and critically acclaimed Mick Hardin series is an atmospheric, tightly crafted testament to Southern noir. The Reluctant Sheriff is a dark, bracing return to the hills of eastern Kentucky where secrets roil beneath the surface, and nothing and no one stays in the past for long. Mick Hardin never wanted to be sheriff. An ex-Army CID officer, he’s supposed to be retired—or he was until his sister, Linda, was shot in the line of duty, requiring him to step in as interim sheriff while she recovered. Now he’s stuck in Rocksalt, the place he was most hoping to escape. Back in uniform, Mick is chafing at the sudden dissolution of his retirement plans, wearied by the petty squabbles of Rocksalt’s townsfolk. It’s all business as usual, until the murder of a local bar owner draws an unlikely suspect who threatens to fan the flames of Mick’s past. When two more bodies turn up, seemingly unconnected to the first, Mick is forced to reckon with the mysterious circumstances of a case not so open-and-shut as everyone believes. Meanwhile, Linda is slowly healing when a familiar business tycoon with a vested interest in her returning as sheriff makes it difficult for her to remain on the sidelines. Unflinching and devilishly compulsive, The Reluctant Sheriff is an explosive thriller confirming Chris Offutt as a Southern writer of muscular prose and unrivaled talent.

FROM AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR CHRIS OFFUTTA dark and fierce return to the Kentucky hills, where nothing is what it seems.Mick Hardin returns to the trials and tribulations of local sheriff duties, whilst the previous sheriff, his sister Linda, recovers from a gunshot wound sustained in the line of duty.Living in Linda’s house in Rocksalt, Mick finds himself entwined in the trials and tribulations of being a sheriff in the perturbing Kentucky community. Unable to retire from a world of dubiousness and violence, Mick Hardin is back with determination to deliver retribution.

FROM AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR CHRIS OFFUTTA dark and fierce return to the Kentucky hills, where nothing is what it seems.Mick Hardin returns to the trials and tribulations of local sheriff duties, whilst the previous sheriff, his sister Linda, recovers from a gunshot wound sustained in the line of duty.Living in Linda’s house in Rocksalt, Mick finds himself entwined in the trials and tribulations of being a sheriff in the perturbing Kentucky community. Unable to retire from a world of dubiousness and violence, Mick Hardin is back with determination to deliver retribution.

»Brillant« New York Times Book ReviewEine tote Frau in den Bergen. Alle wissen etwas, doch der Justiz vertraut keiner. Willkommen in Kentucky.Mick Hardin, Ermittler für das CID der US-Army, ist auf Heimaturlaub. Seine Frau ist hochschwanger, doch sie reden nicht miteinander. Seine Schwester Linda, erst kürzlich zum ersten weiblichen Sheriff von Rowan County aufgestiegen, steht vor ihrem ersten Mordfall, den ihr die lokalen Politiker am liebsten wegnehmen würden. Der übliche Chauvinismus oder geht es um mehr? Mit ihrem Bruder Mick macht sich Linda an die Lösung des Falls, denn sie weiß, dass unter der schönen und rauen Hügellandschaft Kentuckys die Gewalt brodelt und die offizielle Justiz keinen guten Stand hat. Bleibt nur die Frage, was tödlicher ist: die Menschen oder die Unbarmherzigkeit der Natur.

Eine Leiche in der Stadt. Eine Mauer des Schweigens in den Bergen. Und eine Spur, die weit über die Grenzen Kentuckys hinausreicht. In seinem neuen Krimi um den wortkargen Army-Ermittler Mick Hardin lässt Chris Offutt ein weiteres Mal den rauen amerikanischen Süden aufleben – mit all seinen Schattenseiten.Mick Hardin, Ermittler für das CID der US-Army, ist zurück in den Kentucky Hills. Er wurde bei einem Sprengstoffangriff verletzt, außerdem soll er die Scheidungspapiere seiner Frau unterzeichnen. Danach will er so schnell wie möglich wieder verschwinden. Doch dann wird in der Stadt eine Leiche gefunden. Der Tote ist Barney Kissick – der stadtbekannte Drogendealer. Für die Polizei liegt der Fall klar auf der Hand: Einer von Barneys Drogendeals ist schiefgelaufen. Seine Mutter bezweifelt das und bittet Mick um Hilfe. Er beginnt sich umzuhören, dabei hat er seiner Schwester, die kurz vor ihrer Wiederwahl als Sheriff steht, eigentlich versprochen, sich rauszuhalten. Als er tief in der rauen Hügellandschaft auf eine dreckige Spur stößt, steht plötzlich nicht mehr nur die Karriere seiner Schwester, sondern sein eigenes Leben auf dem Spiel.»Ein weiterer exzellenter Mick-Hardin-Thriller. Tolle Charaktere, geballte Spannung. Ein weiterer Volltreffer von Offutt.« Kirkus Reviews»Country Noir vom Feinsten: knallharte Action und toughe, aber kluge Protagonisten, die gezwungenermaßen selbst zu Mördern werden, um den Kreislauf der Gewalt zu stoppen.« Booklist»Fans des zeitgenössischen Kleinstadtkrimis fiebern dem nächsten Offutt entgegen.« Publishers Weekly»Offutt weiß, was gespielt wird, er versteht es, und das ist eine gute Voraussetzung für einen Plot, in dem der erfahrene Ermittler Mick für den Fall wie für seine private Misere eine unkonventionelle Lösung findet.« Peter Körte, FAZ

Quan tot just era un noi, en Tucker va falsificar la seva edat per lluitar a la Guerra de Corea. Anys despres, viu aillat a prop dels Apalatxes amb la seva dona, la Rhonda, i els seus cinc fills. Per guanyar-se la vida treballa per a un home, a qui diuen el Secall, que te una botiga de licors i un negoci de contraban d'alcohol. Quan els serveis socials de l'estat obren expedient per investigar la familia, en Tucker no dubtara a fer servir totes les eines al seu abast, sense excloure la violencia, per protegir aquells que estima. Negra nit es una novel*la sobre l'instint de supervivencia i el sentit de pertinenca. Amb un estil senzill i addictiu, Chris Offutt, un dels autors mes singulars de la literatura contemporania nord-americana, ens introdueix en les vides d'aquesta familia humil, formada per personatges complexos i contradictoris.