After his wife drowns in a bathtub, a death in which he may have been complicit, Bob Reynolds retreats to a tiny town in the wilds of the Ozark Mountains to hide out and nurse his wounds.

There, he sets up housekeeping in a rustic cabin where he raises chickens, writes poetry and lives off a sizeable family inheritance. But if his plan was to live a simple life, he picked the wrong place.

First, Reynolds finds himself inexplicably drawn to Tammy Fay Smith, an incompetent automobile mechanic with needle tracks on her arms. And then, on one of his long walks along Little Piney Creek, he finds a decaying body bobbing face down in the water.

But when Reynolds returns to the scene with Sheriff Sam Baxter, the body has disappeared.

As Reynolds pokes into the mystery, he accidentally entangles himself in a web of dark, small-town secrets that the locals never want to see exposed. And he soon finds himself both suspected of murder and in danger of becoming the next victim.

The result is a suspenseful, hard-boiled crime novel filled with well-drawn, quirky characters and written in a tight, literary prose style.

"Burn What Will Burn" is CB McKenzie's second novel following his 2014 debut, "Bad Country," which won the Tony Hillerman Prize and was a finalist for the Edgar Award.