Wewahitchka/Pottersville is a town with practically no fast food chains or other signs of the tacky modernity of the Sun Belt. Yet, there isn't any small-town cuteness either, gussied up for tourists. To say everyone knows everyone is no exaggeration. Or as I've heard it said, “Everyone here knows a girl is pregnant before the girl herself finds out.” Homes don't need to be locked, and instead of police presence, everybody has guns. Not that they're shooting one another, except in Michael Lister’s novels. Extreme politeness, that Southern trait, is extended to everyone, of every background. There is a black section of town, “the quarters,” mentioned in Power in the Blood. In private conversation you'll hear the notorious N-word, but you're more likely to hear the r-word, from folk who rightfully belong to that group, as “redneck” is used sometimes with humorous pride and sometimes as the identity of those who exhibit ignorance and crassness, coming from the lips of those who in gentler circumstances apply the word to themselves and their kind.

But none of this is obvious. It took my reading Lister’s novels to begin to unravel the mysteries of the world I now live in. I knew there was a prison outside of town, but I'd never been in it. I hadn't spent time in the local bars until Michael and his wife Dawn invited me for an evening out and I heard them both harmonizing on a country song since it was karaoke night. And though my brother-in-law is as local as they come, I'm as outsider as they come—hell, I'm a foreigner. I wanted to learn more, and these violent yet spiritual stories set in what was now my environment were enriching my understanding.

Were I homegrown like Lister, I'd certainly be writing about this region and this town; in fact, this essay is a hopefully not too clumsy attempt to do so. And I'd be drawn to the religious dimension, as he is. It's not just that Wewa and environs have churches of all Protestant denominations, from lofty Episcopalian to the occasional tent revival. It's the blood, the word that occurs, in typical fashion for crime series, in the title of every John Jordan book. The blood of crime, that which soaks the chaplain detective in the very first pages of Power in the Blood, but most importantly the blood of sacrament.