Ace Atkins

“The Redeemers: A Quinn Colson Novel”

Author: Ace Atkins

Publisher: G. P. Putnam’s Sons

Pages: 370 pp.

Price: $26.95 (Hardcover)

Ace Atkins is generating a shelf of novels at an astonishing pace. “Redeemers” is his seventeenth.

After graduation from Auburn where he played football, Ace—his real name—worked as a reporter in Florida, mainly crime. He has several standalone crime novels—historically based like “Wicked City,” set in Phenix City, and investigative/biographically based such as “Infamous,” about Fatty Arbuckle .

When Ace Atkins decided to drop his successful Nick Travers detective series in favor of meticulously researched, historical, stand-alone thrillers, some were dubious. Doubts are dispelled now, however.

By Don Noble

Audio ?2010 AL Public Radio

When Ace Atkins decided to drop his successful Nick Travers detective series in favor of meticulously researched, historical, stand-alone thrillers, some were dubious. Doubts are dispelled now, however.

The writing career of James Lee Burke is, in many ways, typical. After a half dozen literary novels that did not sell much, Burke created his South Louisiana detective, Dave Robicheaux, and the Robicheaux books have come in a steady and profitable stream now for many years.

By Don Noble

In Wicked City, he fictionalizes actual events in the Phenix City of 1954, a place so awful, Atkins writes, "no author could ever exaggerate the sin, sleaze, and moral decay of Phenix City, Alabama, in the fifties or the courage of the people who stood up to fight it."

By Don Noble

Ace Atkins' career has tacked this way and that over the years, but has never strayed very far from crime, especially murder.

Having established his readership, Atkins could have gone on with this series indefinitely, and I am sure his publishers wanted him to, but he has instead written a stand-alone thriller, White Shadow.

By Don Noble

Atkins has just published his fourth Nick Travers suspense/mystery novel. The heart of any such series is the sleuth, of course, and Nick, established in the first novel, Crossroad Blues, is quite a creation.

By Don Noble

Dirty South

Here's the first thing you need to know about Ace Atkins: Ace is his real name. It is on his birth certificate.