South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
‘Pickard County Atlas’ a dark and stunning debut thriller
’Pickard County Atlas’ by Chris Harding Thornton. MCD/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 288p, $26
Violence can shape a family’s emotional and mental growth for decades, as Chris Harding Thornton explores in her stunning debut, “Pickard County Atlas,” set in 1978 Nebraska.
A darkness blankets the Reddick family as well as Pickard County deputy sheriff Harley Jensen, tainting each relationship and how they deal with life, including work. Often subconsciously, each character moves as if in a fog as the past haunts their present.
Nerves fray as a summer heat wave flows through Pickard County. The Reddick family has never moved past 1960, when
7-year-old Dell Reddick was killed by a farmhand who was a Korean War veteran suffering from PTSD. After murdering the boy, the farmhand committed suicide but never revealed where he hid Dell’s body. The death turned Virginia, the mother, into a recluse; Dell Senior became a bully who overworks and underpays his two adult sons — Rick, a restless married father, and Paul, a reckless petty drug dealer who relishes causing havoc. Rick’s wife, Pam, drifts through the days, longing to escape her marriage, their trailer that’s falling apart and being mother to a 3-yearold. She’s tired and overwhelmed by too much of doing without. Dell’s decision to erect a headstone for his son, even without a body, sets in motion “Pickard County Atlas.”
Like the Reddicks, Harley Jensen has never recovered from his mother’s suicide, committed while he and his sister were children playing in the yard. Harley’s suspicion about Paul flares when several abandoned farmhouses are set on fire and a series of odd thefts
occur.
Harding Thornton illustrates how the landscape builds her vision: “North-central Nebraska, the spot where sand met loam, rose and fell around him, cast black against the shadow of sky.” The author also shows how the characters and the region meld: “The place was a cusp, and it’d once drawn people accustomed to life on the cusps. Farm kids, immigrants, children of freed slaves.”
Harding Thornton’s affinity for in-depth characters and noir storytelling soar in the excellent “Pickard County Atlas.”