Seventeen-year-old Wes Trench is working on a shrimp boat with his father, but as the shrimp get skinnier and grayer, his father gets angrier and meaner. Life was already grueling enough in the marshy expanse of land and bay known as the Barataria, just south of New Orleans. But the one-two punch of Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill has desperate residents settling their losses for a check of $1,500 from BP, a sum that will barely last three months. When Wes quits working with his father, he discovers that shrimping is all he knows and that anyone still trying to eke out a living that way is clearly insane. Wes is but one of the narrators in Cooper's evocative novel, which features an extravagant range of viewpoints, such as the nefarious, marijuana-growing Toup twins; Lindquist, a one-armed, pill-popping raconteur with an endless supply of crude knock-knock jokes; ne'er-do-well Cosgrove with his bandy partner in crime, Hanson; and Grimes, a Baratarian native pushing settlements for BP. All are marauders, plundering the land and sea for gold, illegal crops, or dying sea life. Just as there is beauty in the harsh surroundings, there is goodness, even in this ragtag cast of characters. Cooper's exposition is lush with description without swerving from his narrators' points of view. VERDICT Teens who like the oddball characters and environmental consciousness of Carl Hiaasen novels will also enjoy Cooper's debut.-Diane Colson, Nashville Public Library, TN © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Cooper conjures all the complexities of post-Katrina, post-Deepwater Horizon bayou life in his first novel, a noirish crime story with a sense of humor set on the Louisiana Gulf Coast. Each of the memorable main characters is introduced by a short chapter bearing his-or, in the case of the sinister marijuana-growing Toup Brothers, their-name. The shifting perspective keeps things moving along as we move deeper into the muck. Wes Trench ponders whether there's a future in shrimping when the hauls are getting smaller and smaller, and Bayou men like his father are broken down by the time they reach 40. There's Lindquist, a one-armed shrimper who's searching for the fabled treasure of pirate Jean Lafitte in the bay with his metal detector, and whom nobody takes seriously. Then there's Cosgrove and Hanson, a couple of small-time cons, and Grimes, a BP lawyer poking around the Barataria region, asking the old-timers to sign away their claims. Add in some alligators, body parts, and hidden treasure, and this mélange begins to thicken into a roiling gumbo. Cooper's novel is a blast; descriptions of the natural beauty of the cypress swamps and waterways, along with the hardscrabble ways of its singular inhabitants, further elevate this story. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Rumors of lost pirate treasure in the Gulf of Mexico drive hard men mad in the sweaty, desperate days after the BP oil spill.This is one hell of a debut novel. Cooper combines the rough-hewn but poetic style favored by writers like Charles Willeford with the kinds of miscreants so beloved by Elmore Leonard, all operating in the tumultuous modern-day disaster that is New Orleans. Our chief troublemaker is old Gus Lindquist, a one-armed drunk who believes that a hard-to-find island off the coast still holds the buried doubloons of French pirate Jean Lafitte. He hires Wes Trench, the troubled teenage son of a local shrimper, to accompany him on his so-called adventure to find the loot. Unfortunately, the site in Louisiana's Barataria region is also home to a patch of particularly potent weed farmed by Reginald and Victor Toup, two dangerous scumbags who think up stunts like delivering an alligator to Lindquist's bedroom in an attempt to scare him off. Other comic moments come from the efforts of slick BP representative Brady Grimes to convince the hardheaded and suspicious locals to take a paltry, token payment over the massive settlement everyone knows is coming. Lastly, Cooper throws in a pair of wild cards in Nate Cosgrove and John Henry Hanson, unlikely allies who meet on a road crew while serving out their community-service sentences. When Cosgrove and Hanson decide the Toup brothers' ganja is worth ripping off, it all comes boiling over in a conflict not everyone will survive. With crisp, noir-inspired writing and a firmly believable setting, Cooper has written an engaging homage to classic crime writing that still finds things to say about the desperate days we live through now. Somewhere, Donald E. Westlake, John D. MacDonald and Elmore Leonard are smiling down on this nasty, funny piece of work. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

*Starred Review* One-armed shrimper Gus Lindquist, aged beyond his 45 years from the rigors of shrimping, has had his prosthetic arm stolen and pops OxyContin from a child's Pez dispenser. His reaction to the horrific BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is to obsessively search Barataria Bay's swampy islets and cheniers for pirate Jean Lafitte's treasure. Wes Trench, barely out of his teens, blames his father for his mother's loss during Hurricane Katrina; his father refused to evacuate as Katrina approached. But his estrangement worsens as the catch dwindles, the oil plumes ravage the fishing grounds, and a lone BP employee attempts to get the citizens of ramshackle Jeanette, Louisiana, to sign small settlements that indemnify BP against the real losses its negligence caused. The only people unhurt by BP are the scary Toup twins, who grow primo weed on a remote islet. But two down-and-out potheads, Cosgrove and Hanson, arrive in Jeanette from New Orleans to locate and help themselves to the twins' crop. With withering contempt for BP, Cooper offers a believable portrait of a bayou town and a cast of deeply engaging characters wrestling inchoately with the likely extinction of the only life they know. There is real substance and humanity in this fine debut novel.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2010 Booklist

In his self-assured and highly entertaining first novel, Cooper introduces us to the small bayou town of Jeanette, LA. Nestled along the Gulf Coast near Barataria Bay, home of legendary pirate Jean Lafitte, this humble enclave is populated by a cast of unforgettable characters, in particular a one-armed shrimper named Gus Lindquist. As with everyone else in the region, his life has been forever changed by the one-two punch of the BP oil spill and Hurricane Katrina. As he roams the bayou with a metal detector and a fondness for pharmaceuticals, Gus intersects with a collection of other disaffected and disillusioned locals: Wes Trench, a young shrimper whose mother died in Katrina; the murderous Toup twins, who make a living smuggling drugs; Cosgrove and Hanson, small-time criminals who meet on a prison work detail and join forces to capitalize on the misfortunes of others; and Brady Grimes, an emissary for BP whose mission is to convince residents to sign lowball settlements with the oil company. Verdict Cooper's writing is taut, his story is gripping, and the characters and their problems will stay with you long after you finish this book. Recommended for readers who enjoy authors such as Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard and stories set in and around Louisiana.-Amy Hoseth, Colorado State Univ. Lib., Fort Collins (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

IT'S ALWAYS THE VOICE, the singular sound of a place like none other, that draws you into a regional mystery. In Tom Cooper's first novel, THE MARAUDERS (Crown, $26), that beguiling music comes out of the Louisiana bayous, where a raucous chorus of shrimp fishermen, marijuana growers, treasure hunters, professional crooks and common thieves fight to be heard. Every last one of these gaudy characters has a story to tell about life on the Gulf Coast. Gus Lindquist, who keeps misplacing his prosthetic arm when he's had too much to drink, is obsessively hunting for the pirate Jean Lafitte's buried treasure. Bobby Trench, a fisherman who mourns the days of the great shrimp hauls ("Before the oil spill. Before Katrina"), rues his decision to defy the hurricane that dragged his wife out to sea. But it's the voice of Trench's 17-year-old son, Wes, that cuts through the clamor. Proud of coming from a long line of fishermen, Wes wants nothing more than to be a shrimper - and to reach middle age without becoming "hunchbacked and bitter and brokenhearted like his father." The loose plot is composed of episodic scenes and random criminal events that are eventually marshaled into a semi-coherent narrative on the age-old theme of greed. A coldblooded BP representative snakes through the story, pressing fishermen to settle their claims for a song. A couple of inept crooks lurk around the waterways looking for the island where the psychopathic Toup twins grow their marijuana crop. And Trench keeps trying to find a deck hand to go out on the Bayou Sweetheart and work themselves to death for the pitiful hauls from the devastated fisheries. It hurts to laugh at the preposterous get-rich-quick schemes of these swamp denizens, but laugh we must, if only to find some relief from the grim realism of Cooper's portrait of life in these coastal communities after the oil companies sank their pipelines and dug up the marshes and fouled the shrimp beds with millions of gallons of crude. Better to hoot at Gus Lindquist wrestling with the alligator someone put in his bedroom than listen to the story of how he lost his arm or hear his pathetic pipe dreams as he imagines what he'll do when he finds Lafitte's treasure. THERE'S ALWAYS a creep factor in psychological suspense novels, and it makes itself felt right at the outset of Michael Kardos's BEFORE HE FINDS HER (Mysterious Press, $25), a well-crafted woman-in-peril narrative with an uncommon premise and an ending you don't see coming a mile away. Kardos uses an interlocking structure of multiple viewpoints and flashbacks to tell the story of 17-year-old Melanie Denison, who has spent most of her life in the witness protection program, living in a trailer with her aunt and uncle in a rustic West Virginia town. In all those years, Melanie has never been to a city, gone to a dance or seen the ocean. But because she has taken some foolish chances, as heroines in peril tend to do, she's secretly acquired a boyfriend, become pregnant and blown her protective cover. The man Melanie has been hiding from all these years is her father, Ramsey Miller, a long-haul trucker who had a psychotic breakdown after seeing the Grand Canyon. ("You don't matter as much as you think you do, the canyon told him, so lighten up.") Somehow, that directive inspired him to kill his wife and perhaps now, after all these years, to return for his daughter. Melanie is interesting enough, but the person you can't forget is her father. IT TAKES NERVE to make the protagonist of your first novel a print journalist, as Elisabeth de Mariaffi does in the devil YOU KNOW (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, $24.99). When the story opens in 1993, we're back in the dark ages of digital technology and Evie Jones, a cub reporter on the Toronto Free Press, is discovering the joys of working on a computer. Server crashes and screen freezes aside, this new tool certainly makes it easier for her to research an assignment on all the women and girls - including one of her childhood friends - who have gone missing in the past 10 years, the presumed victims of a serial killer known as the Scarborough Rapist. De Mariaffi delivers the requisite heart-in-mouth moments of pure paranoia, but she balances these thrills with shrewd character studies and the odd nugget of wisdom. Like the words of a mother who explains why women are ravenous readers of true crime stories: It's not to scare ourselves, "it's so we learn how to get away." IT'S THE SUMMER of 1942 in Maureen Jennings's latest home-front mystery, NO KNOWN GRAVE (McClelland & Stewart, paper, $22.95), and a group of severely wounded soldiers have found sanctuary with the nursing nuns at St. Anne's Convalescent Hospital. But nothing is sacred in wartime, and the double murder of a staff instructor and his 16-year-old son brings Detective Inspector Tom Tyler to this converted manor house in the rural Shropshire town of Ludlow. Jennings's unusual iteration of the classic country house whodunit presents a pool of suspects who are blind or missing limbs or suffering from shell shock - or are Anglican nuns. Meanwhile, life goes on without them in a town bustling with women pulling shifts at munitions factories, Italian P.O.W.s working on farms and young ladies signing up to be police officers.