Atticus Atticus, a deeply affecting novel by Ron Hansen, opens in winter on the high plains of Colorado to the tropics of Mexico, as well as from the realm of whodunit detective mystery to the larger realm of the Mystery, which has its own heartbreaking, consoling, and redemptive logic. Misunderstanding, dissolute, prodigal, wayward, wastrel, alias, and bribery are only a few words that tell the powerful story of Atticus. The case was labeled as a suicide. The body was identified as forty-year-old Scott William Cody, a blue-eyed white male. The plot of the book takes three sharp turns. It begins as a conventional novel about the relationship between a father and