"Pickard County's dirt was erratic as the weather...it'd once drawn people accustomed to life on cusps. Farm kids, immigrants, children of freed slaves. They'd come a century before for cheap railroad land or cheaper homestead tracts...". In 1978 Nebraska, Pickard County deputy sheriff Harley Jensen, choosing to work the night shift, patrolled the streets of the run down town and the outlying abandoned fields and farmhouses, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Imagine a call to investigate a complaint about an unmowed lawn or a stolen gas can. This night was different. Why was Paul Reddick parked in his F-450 truck at Harley Jensen's abandoned farmhouse?

"Harley saw his shadow was...swallowed by the house that loomed at his back...". It happened in 1938. Dinner prepared. The table set. Tragedy struck. By working nights, Harley could avoid any emotional ties. When his shift ended, he returned to his empty abode.

In 1960, seven year old Dell Reddick Junior was murdered. The killer fessed up but never revealed the location of Dell Junior's body. How could the Reddick family have closure? Mother Virginia Reddick, became a shut-in left with two young boys. Dell Senior, moved out but continued to support the young family. Out of the blue, Dell Senior decided to lay a headstone. "A funeral with no body...no death certificate eighteen years late". "Reddicks would be Reddicks...Virginia had the sense to cut ties and disappear". Youngest son Paul, "had the hostile indifference of a person who valued nothing...he needs to get his shit together". Pam Reinhardt had married Rick Reddick. They lived in a broken down trailer. "Every time she tried to say what little they had was one minor inconvenience away from disaster...one blown tire away from living in a cardboard box, he brought up Dell Junior". "Be glad you don't have a dead missing kid like my parents".

A string of strange events occur at empty farmhouses. Still warm cigarette butts, slightly chilled Cutty Sark, a warm pot belly stove with pieces of burnt clothing. A burglary was committed during a funeral. The deceased's clothing stolen including his underwear! Glen Cox, sheriff cautions Harley, "Don't go jumping straight to Reddick. You can't keep letting that kid get under your skin".

"Pickard County Atlas" by Chris Harding Thornton is a gritty, debut mystery delving into the lifelong effects of trauma and crime. The characters, both primary and secondary, are well fleshed out. The read was gripping and would have been greatly enhanced by a map of the town and its outlying fields and farmhouses.

Thank you Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Net Galley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I received this from Netgalley.com.

"Unfolding over six tense days, Harley Jensen and the Reddick Brothers are on a collision course—propelling them toward an incendiary moment that will either redeem or end them."

Debut novel.. Good book! Dark, gritty, humorous.

4☆

I read Pickard County Atlas in a fury, addicted to the suspense and completely immersed in the dry, desolate small town of Madson. I read all the way to the very end of the author's note, and when I saw that this is Chris Harding Thornton's first novel, I actually gasped out loud, "How is this her DEBUT novel???"

PCA gets a full 5 stars from me. I loved it. It's a dark, simmering country drama that is achingly twisted. The characters are so broken, their stories painful and burning. Somehow in this novel of average length, the author managed the perfect amount of backstory for the characters as well as the setting. The chilling backstory settles around like a low fog, present but not blinding, as the reader wades through the suspense and darkness of the present. We follow Pam, Paul, Rick, and Harley as they tangle and chafe in each other's desperate lives.

The pacing is perfect. It's written in my favorite multiple narrator - third person POV with the constant action and movement that makes a longish book feel fast and hard to put down even as real life begs for attention. The writing is so polished, reflective, emotional, clear, and descriptive that it disappeared, and I simply existed in the story as it unfolded.

It's not the type of thriller that begs an answer to one question. It's not a mystery that asks simply "whodunnit." It's a dark drama of intertwined crimes, mistakes, brokenness, and loss. The author has the characters use analogies like connecting dots or trying to see a constellation from a mass of stars, and that's what it feels like. You're not looking for one conclusion but rather trying to see the whole picture of how the mess unfolds.

I do have mixed feelings about the ending. It's good, not rushed or anything, but I desperately want to know more. We're left with loose ends, but if that's intentional, it does indeed fit with the themes and mood of the book. It makes me want to have Thornton over for dinner and drinks and beg her to tell me everything in her brain about it.

I cannot believe this is Thornton's debut novel. It's excellent. I will absolutely be waiting for more from her! Thank you NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an ecopy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Pickard County Atlas (by Chris Harding Thornton) is so very well written and tightly plotted with such fully realized characters that it seems almost insulting to refer to it as "just" rural noir... or country lit... or a half-dozen other terms which all amount to the same thing - it doesn't take place in the big city and it deals in an almost poetic way with some hard truths. Bottom line: This is a very good book. The fact that it's a debut novel is stunning.

From the official blurb: "Small-town secrets loom large in this spellbinding rural noir about the aftershocks of crime and trauma that shake a Nebraskan town."

I'm going to disagree with one aspect of that. Pickard County Atlas is less about small-town secrets than it is about how, in small-towns, everyone knows everyone else's business. How difficult it is for the past to be forgotten in the kind of place where who you are is as much about who you're related to as it is about how you present yourself within the community.

Almost forty years ago Harley Jenson's family suffered a great tragedy. After all this time people still get a certain look on their faces when in his presence. Now, as a sheriff’s deputy who works night patrol, Harley has more-or-less ceased to be anything other than a function of his job.

About twenty years ago a different kind of tragedy struck the Reddick family. Though it ultimately split the family apart they are still in near constant contact with each other to the point that their ongoing dysfunction threatens to destroy everything around them.

When Pam Reinhardt married into the Reddick family she really didn't put an awful lot of thought into the future, but several years and one child later things have changed. Pam starts to think she made a huge mistake.

It’s July 1978. The nights are hot and restless. The trouble is just beginning.

I highly recommend Pickard County Atlas by Chris Harding Thornton to anyone who enjoys gritty, realistic noir with a light touch of dark humor.

Contains adult language and situations, drug use, and violence.

***I received a free digital copy of this title from NetGalley