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Last of the Dixie Heroes opens with a quietly devastating premise: Roy Hill, an Atlanta middle manager, is downsized from his executive job and finds himself in midlife free fall. To occupy himself, he gets involved with a Confederate Civil War reenactment unit on the recommendation of a co-worker. What follows is the slow, careful documentation of how a perfectly reasonable middle-aged man slides into a darker kind of identity.
Abrahams is treating the reenactor subculture with more honesty than the book's premise might lead you to expect. He understands what its members are looking for. He also understands that for some of them, the search ends in places the rest are not prepared for. The case Roy gets pulled into is partly about the unit and partly about his own ex-wife and son.
The ending is melancholy rather than thrilling. Four stars. One of the more interesting suburban-drift novels of the early 2000s.
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