Hard Cash Valley by Brian Panowich
Dane Kirby has been drifting through life since the death of his wife and daughter ten years earlier. A former fire chief, now part-time investigator for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Dane has a girlfriend who loves him and friends who care deeply but he can't seem to connect with them and spends more time talking to his dead wife than he does with the living. He is unexpectedly called in by the FBI when a small-time hoodlum from Georgia is found horribly murdered in a Florida motel. The murdered man recently won $1.2 million on cockfighting but both the money and the man's younger brother are missing. Kirby teams up with an agent who is less than thrilled to be working with him, and they follow the money and the kid back to Kirby's home grounds in Georgia near Bull Mountain.
Brian Panowich returns to the Georgia mountains from his first two thrillers. A few characters recur but this is largely a new cast and the focus is not on the Burroughs clan. This is a fast-paced quick thriller that keeps the reader turning pages. Panowich's characters are what make the story notable, despite their dumb mistakes and decisions (as I've told fellow librarians, if characters didn't make dumb choices, there wouldn't be a novel). The ending is a little sappy but if you like a feel-good or hopeful ending, you'll be okay with it.
Many thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for providing a review copy in exchange for a review.
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