Ace Atkins

Ace Atkins is an American crime novelist known both for his own Quinn Colson series and for being hand-picked by the estate of Robert B. Parker to continue Parker's iconic Spenser series after Parker's death in 2010. Atkins has written numerous Spenser novels since taking over the series with Lullaby in 2012, working to preserve Parker's distinctive terse, wisecracking style and Boston setting while bringing his own research and storytelling instincts to the long-running private-investigator series.

Atkins's own creation, the Quinn Colson series, follows an Army Ranger returned home to become sheriff of a corrupt, poverty-stricken corner of rural Mississippi, and draws on Atkins's background as a journalist and true-crime writer, including a Pulitzer Prize-nominated newspaper career, to bring a grittier, more socially engaged Southern-crime sensibility distinct from his Spenser work. He has also written standalone crime novels grounded in real historical events, including White Shadow and Wicked City. New readers of Spenser can pick up any of Atkins's continuation novels without having read Parker's originals, since each case is self-contained, though longtime Parker fans generally appreciate Atkins's evident care with the character's established voice; new readers of Quinn Colson should start with The Ranger, the series' first book. Atkins continues to publish new entries in both series regularly.