The Dirty South was published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2020. Uniquely in the series, it is a prequel: set in 1997, shortly after the murder of Parker’s wife and daughter (the event that opens Every Dead Thing). Parker, raw with grief and fury, has left New York and is drifting south. He stops in Burdon County, Arkansas — one of the poorest counties in the state, where a corporate investment promises to bring prosperity.
Young Black women are being murdered in Burdon County, and the sheriff knows that drawing attention to the killings will scare away the corporate investment that is the county’s only hope of economic survival. Parker, with nothing left to lose, inserts himself into the investigation — not hired, not wanted, driven by something between conscience and self-destruction.
The novel reveals Parker at his most damaged: drinking, violent, barely functional. But it also shows the origins of his method — his refusal to accept that some victims are less important than others, his insistence that justice cannot be conditional on economic convenience. The “dirty south” is both geographical (the poverty and racism of rural Arkansas) and moral (the compromises that communities make when they decide that some lives are expendable).
Collecting The Dirty South
First edition (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 2020): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- UK first edition, fine/fine: $20–$45
- US first (Atria, 2020), fine/fine: $15–$30