The Marauders
Tim Cooper, 2015
Crown Publishing
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780804140560
Summary
When the BP oil spill devastates the Gulf coast, those who made a living by shrimping find themselves in dire straits.
For the oddballs and lowlifes who inhabit the sleepy, working class bayou town of Jeannette, these desperate circumstances serve as the catalyst that pushes them to enact whatever risky schemes they can dream up to reverse their fortunes.
At the center of it all is Gus Lindquist, a pill-addicted, one armed treasure hunter obsessed with finding the lost treasure of pirate Jean Lafitte. His quest brings him into contact with a wide array of memorable characters, ranging from a couple of small time criminal potheads prone to hysterical banter, to the smooth-talking Oil company middleman out to bamboozle his own mother, to some drug smuggling psychopath twins, to a young man estranged from his father since his mother died in Hurricane Katrina.
As the story progresses, these characters find themselves on a collision course with each other, and as the tension and action ramp up, it becomes clear that not all of them will survive these events. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
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Book Reviews
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, 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.
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times Book Review
Sad, grotesque, hilarious, breathtaking...stands with ease among the work of such stylistic predecessors as Twain, Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard. One thing that gives The Marauders its own clear hallmark is its quicksilver prose. The book’s other standout aspect is how it demands and earns sympathy for all but its most evil characters and for the fate-blasted but nature-blessed locale they inhabit. You might not want to retire there, but you’ll savor this visit.
Wall Street Journal
Excellent, finely written and funny—an admirable novel from a very promising writer.
USA Today
Tom Cooper has Louisiana dead to rights. Every aspect. Jeanette, the sleepy bayou town ravaged by man and nature alike, is rendered in Technicolor detail. Its residents, lifers and visitors alike, leap from the pages. The story rolls like a tide, handling triumph and tragedy alike with a dark, mischievous humor that Cooper wields expertly…There’s more than a hint of the Southern gothic here, more than a little Flannery O’Connor…It’s easy to forget this is his first novel. Some books require boxes of tissues. This one requires an, as Cooper writes, “an ass-pocket whiskey bottle.” Get you a drink and get comfortable. You won’t be moving until you hit the last page.
Beth Colvin - Baton Rouge Advocate
The first great book of the 2015 beach season is already here...Tom Cooper’s début novel, The Marauders, certainly should not be confined to beach season or to the implication that it’s light or airless good fun, but it seems to be a book that should be savored on a deck overlooking the beach or pool with a cold beer nearby...an enjoyable and impossibly difficult to put down novel.
Drew Gallagher - Fredericksburg Free Lance Star
Cooper conjures all the complexities of post-Katrina, post–Deepwater Horizon bayou life..., a noirish crime story with a sense of humor set on the Louisiana Gulf Coast.... 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.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Self-assured and highly entertaining...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.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) 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.
Booklist
(Starred review.) 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.. 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.
Kirkus Reviews
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