A little over five
years has passed since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and lower
Louisiana. Bayou residents are feeling the effects of the BP Deepwater Horizon
Explosion and Oil Spill. BP says the oil hasn’t hurt the environment, but the
shrimpers and the other fisherman know better. They are barely, barely eeking
out a living.
Author Tom Cooper’s
first novel centers around seven characters with a setting in the bayous and
swamps of Barataria and the small town of Jeanette, basically suburbs of New
Orleans. First there are the Toup brothers. Identical twins Reginald and Victor
are drug dealers with a rather large field of marijuana growing on of the
remote islands in the swamp. They do whatever they need to do keep their secret
safe, even if it involves murder and stealing a man’s prosthetic arm to keep in
him line.
Then readers are
introduced to Gus Lindquist. A one-armed, OxyContin-dependent shrimper, he is
about to give up on shrimping. As the shrimp dwindle in the oil-soaked waters,
Lindquist re-focuses his attention on a boyhood dream: searching the swamp for
pirate Jean Lafitte’s long-lost treasure.
Next come Cosgrove and
Hanson, two petty criminals who meet doing community service. They desperately
seeking any get-rich, half-brained idea they come across. There’s the teenager Wes Trench, eighteen
years-old and still reeling from his mother’s death during Katrina. Finally,
there is the BP middleman, Brady Grimes, who is trying to get the residents of
the area to take BP’s meager settlement offer. Until he has to face his own
mother.
Cooper weaves the
stories; each character or set of characters acting out a mini-novel of their
own, but as the stories merge, something more sinister and dangerous begins to
appear. At times hilarious and at others deeply profound, the novel is
compulsive reading. I was eager to learn what kind of mess(es) these good ol’
boys could get themselves into.
I received this novel
for free from Blogging for Books in exchange for this review.
I give The Marauders 5 out of 5 stars.
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