Heaven, My Home

July 1, 2019

Texas Ranger Darren Mathews, whose latest assignment has been on a task force probing the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, is sent to the town of Jefferson to help the local sheriff investigate the disappearance of nine-year-old Levi King, the son of a major player in the Brotherhood now serving time in prison. Darren's personal life is in a precarious position, and he is harboring secrets concerning the previous murder of another member of the Brotherhood (see Bluebird, Bluebird). Once in Jefferson, Darren immediately gets caught up in the bigotry in the area and is not welcomed by the white sheriff, his deputies, or the matriarch of the town. He soon finds the twists and turns of this investigation to be as difficult to navigate as the cypress swamp of nearby Caddo Lake, which seems to be central to the entire case. VERDICT Edgar Award winner Locke is definitely worth following, here presenting a well-crafted mystery that evokes a steamy east Texas and the racial tensions inherent in small Southern towns.--Sandra Knowles, formerly South Carolina State Lib., Columbia

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 15, 2019
The redoubtable Locke follows up her Edgar-winning Bluebird, Bluebird (2017) with an even knottier tale of racism and deceit set in the same scruffy East Texas boondocks. It's the 2016 holiday season, and African American Texas Ranger Darren Matthews has plenty of reasons for disquiet besides the recent election results. Chiefly there's the ongoing fallout from Darren's double murder investigation involving the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. He and his wife are in counseling. He's become a "desk jockey" in the Rangers' Houston office while fending off suspicions from a district attorney who thinks Darren hasn't been totally upfront with him about a Brotherhood member's death. (He hasn't.) And his not-so-loving mother is holding on to evidence that could either save or crucify him with the district attorney. So maybe it's kind of a relief for Darren to head for the once-thriving coastal town of Jefferson, where the 9-year-old son of another Brotherhood member serving hard time for murdering a black man has gone missing while motorboating on a nearby lake. Then again, there isn't that much relief given the presence of short-fused white supremacists living not far from descendants of the town's original black and Native American settlers--one of whom, an elderly black man, is a suspect in the possible murder of the still-missing boy. Meanwhile, Darren's cultivating his own suspicions of chicanery involving the boy's wealthy and imperious grandmother, whose own family history is entwined with the town's antebellum past and who isn't so fazed with her grandson's disappearance that she can't have a lavish dinner party at her mansion. In addition to her gifts for tight pacing and intense lyricism, Locke shows with this installment of her Highway 59 series a facility for unraveling the tangled strands of the Southwest's cultural legacy and weaving them back together with the volatile racial politics and traumatic economic stresses of the present day. With her confident narrative hands on the wheel, this novel manages to evoke a portrait of Trump-era America--which, as someone observes of a pivotal character in the story, resembles "a toy ball tottering on a wire fence" that "could fall either way." Locke's advancement here is so bracing that you can't wait to discover what happens next along her East Texas highway.

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Starred review from July 29, 2019
Edgar-winner Locke’s searing sequel to 2017’s Bluebird, Bluebird finds African-American Texas Ranger Darren Matthews reconciled with his wife, though to maintain their marriage, he has agreed to take a desk job at the Rangers’ Houston office, where he’s assigned to analyze digital surveillance data on his state’s chapter of the Aryan Brotherhood. Then nine-year-old Levi King, the son of Aryan Brotherhood of Texas captain Bill “Big Kill” King, disappears in Marion County, and Matthews returns to field duty. Meanwhile, Bill, who evaded justice for killing a black man but is serving 20 years in prison on drug charges, writes to the governor to request an exhaustive search for his son. Matthews’s boss, who’s seeking an indictment of the Brotherhood, including Bill, hopes that the search for Levi will yield information that can be used against his father—before the incoming Trump administration, with its lack of interest in pursuing white supremacists, takes power. Matthew’s legal jeopardy from a prior case hovers over the action, but Locke makes the complex backstory accessible. This one’s another Edgar contender. Agent: Richard Abate, 3 Arts Entertainment.

JD Jackson needs the range of a grand piano to do justice to Attica Locke's East Texas, and his skills and appealing baritone have it covered. Locke's protagonist, Darren Matthews, is an African-American Texas Ranger with a rocky marriage, a drinking problem, and a penchant for doing bad things for good reasons. In his morally messy world, 9-year-old Levi King has disappeared among the haunted islands of Lake Caddo. This would tug Matthews's heartstrings harder if the child were not the race-baiting scion of Aryan Brotherhood royalty. Locke is protecting no one here, and Jackson makes these flawed, believable characters a pleasure to love or hate. Add some antebellum fantasy tourist trap fraudsters, and you have a distinctly uncozy puzzle for our time, beautifully performed. B.G. � AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Starred review from July 1, 2019
After a long undercover stint, African American Texas Ranger Darren Matthews (introduced in Bluebird, Bluebird, 2017) takes a new approach in the Rangers' case against the Aryan Brotherhood. Levi King, a nine-year-old with family ties to the Brotherhood, has disappeared. Levi was last seen on Caddo Lake in Jefferson, a moss-draped hamlet steeped in antebellum history. In Jefferson, Darren confirms his gut feeling that the disappearance goes deeper than family dysfunction. Levi had been living in an informal trailer park in Hopetown, property deeded as a free blacks' community during Reconstruction. Decades of economic hardship have reduced the once-thriving community to a handful of residents led by elderly Leroy Page. To fund Hopetown's upkeep, Page leased land to Levi's grandfather and watched helplessly as Levi's mother legally assumed the lease, and her boyfriend turned the tract into a white-power settlement. Page, the last person to see Levi, becomes the prime suspect after revealing a recent confrontation over racist graffiti. Darren isn't Page's biggest fan, but the disappearance of a visiting real-estate attorney and the heavily enforced secrecy of the town's steely matriarch don't gel with the straightforward revenge theory. This is a beautifully written and instantly gripping crime novel; Darren Matthews is brutally honest both in his troubled personal life, as he deals with a deteriorating marriage, and on the job, as he faces down both casual hatred and the more virulent variety promulgated by the Aryan Brotherhood.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Locke is one of the emerging stars of crime fiction, and her latest is already attracting attention on social media.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)