The Marauders

In Jeanette, in Louisiana, the small bay of Barataria, in the Jefferson paris, upon the Gulf Coast, life has become tough.  Formerly famous for protecting the freebooters led by the famous Jean Lafitte, the small bayou town made its living by shrimping, hunting muskrats for their fur and the exploitation of natural resources (oil, suffer and natural gas).

Unfortunately, the working class bayou town is hit pretty hard twice : after the Hurricane Katrina and after the BP oil spill devastates the Gulf coast, cutting jobs by hundreds.  This is where Tom Cooper, the author, has decided to put his characters, mostly oddballs and lowlifes, who, in the middle of this mess,  are willing to take risky schemes to turn their lives around. Let me introduce you to The Marauders :

Meet Gus Lindquist, the one armed pill-addicted loser. His wife has left him, his daughter doesn’t give a damn about him and the man has one obsession : finding the lost treasure of pirate Jean Lafitte.  His quest pushes him to leave his fishing boat and browse the bayou with his metal detector looking for gold coins.  But one night Gus comes too close to an island where two psychopath twins, Reginald and Victor Troup, have smuggled their marijuana plantation. The warning is immediate : they steal his artificial arm but Gus refuses to give in.  The man has faith. This is when he meets a young man, Wes Trench, estranged from his father, a fisherman, since his mother died in Hurricane Katrina. Wes is done helping his father. The man has too many debts and can’t help fighting with his kid for anything. Wes runs away and agrees to work for Gus mostly, watching his boat while the man is searching the treasure.

What about Hanson and Cosgrove ? Two small time criminal potheads prone to hysterical banter. Both are sentenced to do community work in the home of an old lady. The woman dozes off easily and they decide to take advantage of the situation, especially after Cosgrove finds out she could be an offspring of Laffite. The old map pointing out to a spot in the bayou could be their key to a better fortune.

Don’t forget the smooth-talking Oil company middle man, Brady Grimes, the scavenger whose mission is to bamboozle the inhabitants, including his own mother.

As the story progresses, these characters find themselves on a collision course with each other,  and as the tension and the rhythm ram up, you know that not all of them will make out alive.

Did you know that it said that over 3,000 pirates were hiding in the Barataria Bay in the 1800 ?

Tom Cooper is a genius : I’ve become pretty fond of Lindquist and Cosgrove. The novelist offers us a finely written and funny novel. Can you believe it’s Tom Cooper’s first novel ? The guy has come up with great characters, between the treasure hunters, the crooks, the small criminals and the shrimp fishermen, it’s hard not to laugh every five seconds – sometimes to laugh at them with their get-rich-quick schemes, but “mostly to find some relief from the harsh realism of Tom Cooper’s portrait of life in these small coastal communities” as a journalist says it perfectly.  

The book is impossibly difficult to put down ! I’ve read over 250 pages in one time. The dialogues are crazy and hilarious. I couldn’t help falling in love with Gus, whose has the stupid habit to tell a joke every time he meets someone. It’s excruciating. What about Cosgrove who has never set a foot in the bayou ? Poor him !  But what makes it a great novel is Cooper’s talent to show humanity in these characters. In this swamp noir, there’s hope, a light : the love of a father for his son, the faith in the existence of Lafitte’s treasure but mostly the deep love for their town expressed by its inhabitants – the sense of community, the support during these rough times.

So, if you have any sympathy for losers, if you enjoy when a novel goes from hilarious to heartbreaking, sometimes in the course of a single scene, if you enjoy when the place is a whole character and at last, if you enjoy stories about ghosts and pirates, then you’ll love that novel !

“A debut novel that does nothing in half measures. It isn’t afraid to take risks, dabble in darkness and skirt the edge of ruin, and this is what makes it such an exciting read…The Marauders takes readers on a rollicking adventure deep into the heart of Louisiana’s marshes as well as some of the darkest corners of the human psyche…The plot is brisk, the characters are captivating and the writing is lush and striking. Cooper’s writing is the kind a reader can happily get lost in, and his depictions of the Deep South are so evocative that if he ever gets tired of fiction, he might give travel writing a try. But The Marauders is such an impressive offering from an audacious new voice in fiction that one can only hope it is but the first of many. As far as bibliophilic treasure hunts go, this one is literary gold.” – Bookpage

So what’s your excuse for not reading this book ?