Book Review: CHIEFS by Stuart Woods

CHIEFS by Stuart Woods.  (G.P. Putnam’s Sons) Paperback, 430 pages. Published July 2005. (First publication 1981).  ISBN 045121580X

 

from the Goodreads website summary . . . . .

 

Stuart Woods' Edgar Award-winning novel spans fifty years of racial tension, politics, and murder in the small Southern town of Delano, Georgia, where a depraved killer claims his innocent victims even as three very different generations of policemen seek to stop him.

 

      For the people of Delano, Georgia, 1920 was a landmark year. That winter they elected their first police chief, built the first jail. . .and discovered the first body -- the naked, brutalized corpse of a young boy. 

 

     So began a forty-year manhunt that would embroil three generations of small-town police chiefs in the dark, twisted secrets of their sleepy, God-fearing community -- and expose a seamy underbelly of hatred, corruption, and perversion too terrible to imagine. . .and too virulent to ignore.  

 

 

My review on the Goodreads website . . . . .

 

     Reading CHIEFS marked my return to Stuart Woods' writing. I had read a Stone Barrington novel many years back, and while I liked it I wasn't impressed enough to search out more.

 

     I was re-introduced to Woods by my brother-in-law, who is a fan of the Barrington novels, and lent me several books by Woods. 

I picked up this one to read first and I'm very glad I did. It's a real winner, and even more notable in that it happens to be Woods' very first novel (1981) which he spent eight years in completing. 

 

     His hard work and research shows throughout CHIEFS. 

It's historical fiction that covers events in a small town (Delano, GA) through it's formative years spanning the 1920s through the 1960s by following both politics and law enforcement. 

 

     The book is divided into three sections, each covering a specific chief of police and the challenges they encounter in performing their job (illegal liquor, racial profiling and the KKK, criminals, burglaries, etc). The one unifying thread is the evidence gathered by the first chief identifying a potential serial killer of young runaway boys that remains unresolved. The second chief picks up the thread and nothing definitive occurs until the third chief solves the crime in the final pages of the novel. 

 

     Like most epic historical novels, there are plenty of characters all fully realized by Woods with many of them overlapping into all three sections of the novel. A great read.