William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor are two pillars of Southern literature—and for that matter, much of contemporary Southern culture. Writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers have all acknowledged their debt to the way both were able to capture the paradoxical and often twisted spirit of the South. Bret Lott would undoubtedly acknowledge that influence, too—his writing style cribs so much from them, he'd be a fool not to—yet his new mystery novel, The Hunt Club, owes just as much to the soft-boiled sentimentality of contemporary southerners like Pat Conroy and John Grisham. The Hunt Club opens as though Lott were working from a how-to manual on Southern literature: Huger Dillard is a quiet, especially literate 15-year-old boy splitting time between his divorced mother's home in a poor section of Charleston, South Carolina, and his widowed, blind uncle's rural hunting club outside the city. One morning, a hunter's body is discovered decapitated at the club, simultaneously setting the mystery in motion and dragging the obligatory family skeletons out of the closet for examination. The stock themes of racism, class struggle, greed, and family dysfunction are all dutifully included, as Huger and his uncle attempt to untangle the increasingly messy web. Unfortunately, it never untangles. As the bodies and unearthed secrets pile up, The Hunt Club grows more and more absurd: The initially endearing characters are overshadowed by Lott's tiresome efforts to shock his readers with a startling new revelation in every chapter. Eventually, even Lott seems confused, as he resorts to having his characters deliver canned explanations of their motives and actions to try to sort out the mess he's made. Ultimately, the mess is in the writing, which foolishly grabs only the superficial elements of Southern literature and forgets the heart.