by Ace Atkins ★★★★☆
Addison McKellar's husband, Dean, has disappeared before. Normally she wouldn't worry -- Dean works a lot -- but this time it feels different. He won't return calls or texts, and his assistant continues to assure her he's fine but give her the runaround on any additional details. After he's been gone and out of contact for a week, she eventually goes to his office in downtown Memphis to try to get some answers in person, only to find that McKellar Construction hasn't existed there for over two years. Suddenly, everything she thought she knew about her life comes into question.
After being met with heavy skepticism at the police station when she reports her husband missing ("he probably ran off with a woman" is the repeated reaction), she swallows her pride and turns to her father Sami Hassan for help. Sami runs a Memphis barbecue joint, but he has a more checkered past which has afforded him a wide network of people with various skills. One of those is Porter Hayes, a private investigator and Memphis law enforcement legend. Porter and Sami go way back, and when Addison shares who her father is, Hayes agrees to help her locate her husband.
Don't Let the Devil Ride had all the trappings of a book I would enjoy, but it never fully hit the mark for me. Porter Hayes is a great character, but Addison McKellar and those in her orbit (her children, her brother- and sister-in-law, her country club friends) are all significantly unlikeable. Atkins introduces several adjacent characters to the plot as well: a Frenchman named Gaultier; a former starlet named Joanna Grayson (and her daughter Tippi) who is trying to squeeze the last bit of juice from a brief friendship with Elvis; and Leslie Grimes, the founder of a Christian gift shop and bookstore chain who also happens to be the "third richest man in Arkansas". Like those in Addison's orbit, I had no desire to root for any of these people. With no one to care about but Porter Hayes, I wasn't ever fully invested in the story.
Atkins does do a great job of building and alluding to history for Hayes, discussing past events in a familiar way that led me to wonder if this was the latest in a serious of novels about the investigator. It turns out that this is the first novel to feature Hayes, but Atkins has suggested in interviews that he has a "Porter Hayes prequel" in the works. That tracks, given how much he thought about and hinted at Hayes's past in Devil, and given my appreciation for that character, it's one I might just pick up if Atkins publishes it.
Overall, the second half of the novel is better than the first half, but this landed squarely between a 3 and a 4 for me. I rounded up, but there are better southern noir novels out there, with a more complete (and likable) cast of characters. My love for S.A. Cosby is well-documented on barlinsbooks.com, and anything by Cosby (Blacktop Wasteland, Razonblade Tears, All the Sinners Bleed) easily tops this one.
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