The Marauders

December 8, 2014
Cooper conjures all the complexities of post-Katrina, post–Deepwater Horizon bayou life in his first novel, a noirish crime story with a sense of humor set on the Louisiana Gulf Coast. Each of the memorable main characters is introduced by a short chapter bearing his—or, in the case of the sinister marijuana-growing Toup Brothers, their—name. The shifting perspective keeps things moving along as we move deeper into the muck. Wes Trench ponders whether there’s a future in shrimping when the hauls are getting smaller and smaller, and Bayou men like his father are broken down by the time they reach 40. There’s Lindquist, a one-armed shrimper who’s searching for the fabled treasure of pirate Jean Lafitte in the bay with his metal detector, and whom nobody takes seriously. Then there’s Cosgrove and Hanson, a couple of small-time cons, and Grimes, a BP lawyer poking around the Barataria region, asking the old-timers to sign away their claims. Add in some alligators, body parts, and hidden treasure, and this mélange begins to thicken into a roiling gumbo. Cooper’s novel is a blast; descriptions of the natural beauty of the cypress swamps and waterways, along with the hardscrabble ways of its singular inhabitants, further elevate this story.

Starred review from December 1, 2014
Rumors of lost pirate treasure in the Gulf of Mexico drive hard men mad in the sweaty, desperate days after the BP oil spill.This is one hell of a debut novel. Cooper combines the rough-hewn but poetic style favored by writers like Charles Willeford with the kinds of miscreants so beloved by Elmore Leonard, all operating in the tumultuous modern-day disaster that is New Orleans. Our chief troublemaker is old Gus Lindquist, a one-armed drunk who believes that a hard-to-find island off the coast still holds the buried doubloons of French pirate Jean Lafitte. He hires Wes Trench, the troubled teenage son of a local shrimper, to accompany him on his so-called adventure to find the loot. Unfortunately, the site in Louisiana's Barataria region is also home to a patch of particularly potent weed farmed by Reginald and Victor Toup, two dangerous scumbags who think up stunts like delivering an alligator to Lindquist's bedroom in an attempt to scare him off. Other comic moments come from the efforts of slick BP representative Brady Grimes to convince the hardheaded and suspicious locals to take a paltry, token payment over the massive settlement everyone knows is coming. Lastly, Cooper throws in a pair of wild cards in Nate Cosgrove and John Henry Hanson, unlikely allies who meet on a road crew while serving out their community-service sentences. When Cosgrove and Hanson decide the Toup brothers' ganja is worth ripping off, it all comes boiling over in a conflict not everyone will survive. With crisp, noir-inspired writing and a firmly believable setting, Cooper has written an engaging homage to classic crime writing that still finds things to say about the desperate days we live through now. Somewhere, Donald E. Westlake, John D. MacDonald and Elmore Leonard are smiling down on this nasty, funny piece of work.

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February 1, 2016

Seventeen-year-old Wes Trench is working on a shrimp boat with his father, but as the shrimp get skinnier and grayer, his father gets angrier and meaner. Life was already grueling enough in the marshy expanse of land and bay known as the Barataria, just south of New Orleans. But the one-two punch of Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill has desperate residents settling their losses for a check of $1,500 from BP, a sum that will barely last three months. When Wes quits working with his father, he discovers that shrimping is all he knows and that anyone still trying to eke out a living that way is clearly insane. Wes is but one of the narrators in Cooper's evocative novel, which features an extravagant range of viewpoints, such as the nefarious, marijuana-growing Toup twins; Lindquist, a one-armed, pill-popping raconteur with an endless supply of crude knock-knock jokes; ne'er-do-well Cosgrove with his bandy partner in crime, Hanson; and Grimes, a Baratarian native pushing settlements for BP. All are marauders, plundering the land and sea for gold, illegal crops, or dying sea life. Just as there is beauty in the harsh surroundings, there is goodness, even in this ragtag cast of characters. Cooper's exposition is lush with description without swerving from his narrators' points of view. VERDICT Teens who like the oddball characters and environmental consciousness of Carl Hiaasen novels will also enjoy Cooper's debut.-Diane Colson, Nashville Public Library, TN

Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2014
One-armed shrimper Gus Lindquist, aged beyond his 45 years from the rigors of shrimping, has had his prosthetic arm stolen and pops OxyContin from a child's Pez dispenser. His reaction to the horrific BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is to obsessively search Barataria Bay's swampy islets and cheniers for pirate Jean Lafitte's treasure. Wes Trench, barely out of his teens, blames his father for his mother's loss during Hurricane Katrina; his father refused to evacuate as Katrina approached. But his estrangement worsens as the catch dwindles, the oil plumes ravage the fishing grounds, and a lone BP employee attempts to get the citizens of ramshackle Jeanette, Louisiana, to sign small settlements that indemnify BP against the real losses its negligence caused. The only people unhurt by BP are the scary Toup twins, who grow primo weed on a remote islet. But two down-and-out potheads, Cosgrove and Hanson, arrive in Jeanette from New Orleans to locate and help themselves to the twins' crop. With withering contempt for BP, Cooper offers a believable portrait of a bayou town and a cast of deeply engaging characters wrestling inchoately with the likely extinction of the only life they know. There is real substance and humanity in this fine debut novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)