Shifty's Boys by Chris Offutt

This is Offutt’s fourth novel to go along with two story collections and three memoirs. Offutt grew up in Haldeman, Kentucky, living in a mansion built by an early industrialist that his father, an insurance agent and author of pornography, chose for its isolation and beautiful Eastern Kentucky environs. After high school, Offutt hitch-hiked around the country taking working-class jobs and intermittently enrolling in Morehead State University near his childhood home. He graduated from the prestigious University of Iowa creative writing graduate program in 1990 and has been teaching at the University of Mississippi for several years. He puts words together masterfully, and his novels and stories are close enough to stereotypical that they engender great discussion in college classrooms in Appalachia. Shifty’s Boys is the second Mick Hardin novel after The Killing Hills published last year. “Another excellent Mick Hardin thriller set in rural eastern Kentucky… Come for the thriller, by a