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"The Marauders is so damned good you won’t believe it’s a first novel…It’s rollicking, angry, eye-popping, and fall-on-the-floor funny, sometimes in the course of a single scene. The cast is winning, the post-Katrina bayou setting is richly evoked, the dialogue crackles, and the story rolls on a wave of invention. It’s a little Elmore Leonard, a little Charles Portis, and very much its own uniquely American self. Basically, Tom Cooper has written one hell of a novel.”
— Stephen King
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“Wade into moral muck with the pill-popping, treasure-hunting, one-armed hero of this finger-lickin’-good Louisiana swamp noir.”
— O, The Oprah Magazine
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“Sad, grotesque, hilarious, breathtaking…[with] quicksilver prose. The book’s other standout aspect is how it demands and earns sympathy for all but its most evil characters and for the fate-blasted but nature-blessed locale they inhabit. You might not want to retire there, but you’ll savor this visit.”
— Wall Street Journal
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“Excellent, finely written, and funny—an admirable novel from a very promising writer.”
— USA Today
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“It’s always the voice, the singular sound of a place like none other, that draws you into a regional mystery. In Tom Cooper’s first novel, The Marauders, that beguiling music comes out of the Louisiana bayous, where a raucous chorus of shrimp fishermen, marijuana growers, treasure hunters, professional crooks and common thieves fight to be heard…It hurts to laugh at the preposterous get-rich-quick schemes of these swamp denizens, but laugh we must, if only to find some relief from the grim realism of Cooper’s portrait of life in these coastal communities.”
— New York Times Book Review
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“More fun than a book about the aftermath of an ecological disaster has any right to be.”
— Esquire
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“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.”
— Booklist (starred review)
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“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.”
— Publishers Weekly
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“The story is excellent on its own—add a top-notch narration, and it’s something special. Ochlan nails both the accents and the personalities of the oddballs, pillheads, and rip-off artists who live in Jeannette, just another Louisiana shrimping town devastated by nature and man. He believably renders psychotic twins, a teenager, and a one-armed treasure hunter with an affinity for knock-knock jokes. Ochlan’s performance is a huge win for listeners. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
— AudioFile
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“Cooper expertly maps a Gulf Coast of miscreants, romantics, and a severely beleaguered nature, digging at the old, weird south with his own enthralling voice…Cooper joins such talents as Twain, Portis, and O’Toole in mining the humor of the Southern freak show to deliver the universal news of the human heart.”
— Nic Pizzolatto, creator of True Detective