Bluebird, Bluebirdby Attica Locke
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Highway 59 #1
Publication Date: September 12, 2017
Genre: mystery: modern (1980-present)
Pages: 320
ReRead?: Yes
A powerful thriller about the explosive intersection of love, race, and justice from a writer and producer of the Emmy winning Fox TV show Empire.
When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules--a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the lone star state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home.
When his allegiance to his roots puts his job in jeopardy, he travels up Highway 59 to the small town of Lark, where two murders--a black lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman--have stirred up a hornet's nest of resentment. Darren must solve the crimes--and save himself in the process--before Lark's long-simmering racial fault lines erupt.
A rural noir suffused with the unique music, color, and nuance of East Texas, Bluebird, Bluebird is an exhilarating, timely novel about the collision of race and justice in America.
This is the first book in the Highway 59 trilogy by Attica Locke, featuring Darren Mathews, a black man and a Texas Ranger. Locke is a screenwriter as well as a novelist – she was a writer on the Fox series Empire – and it definitely shows in this book. It fairly crackles with tension and visitual imagery and would make an incredible piece of streaming television in the Bosch tradition.
Set in Lark, Texas, a small town the piney woods of east Texas, the main character is a deeply conflicted man, torn between his sworn duty as a peace officer and the reality of the racism that entirely infects the culture around him. He becomes involved in the investigation of a black lawyer from Chicago, who was murdered in Lark after he was blamed for the murder of a local white woman, that reaches back into a violent and racist past.
Mathews meets the wife of the murdered lawyer and stubbornly persists in an investigation that everyone, including his superiors in the Rangers, would just as soon he left alone. And his badge cannot protect him as he continues to dig around in the lives of the people living in Lark, who would also prefer that he return to Houston and leave them to their new Klan gatherings and meth dealing. As the investigation unfolds, there are wheels within wheels turning, and it has the potential to cost him everything, from his badge to his marriage to his life.
There are three books in Locke’s trilogy – Heaven my Home and Guide Me Home. The final book was published in September of 2024, and I just haven’t had time to get to it yet.