Country Noir: Heaven, My Home by Attica Locke

“That was the thing about second changes—it was impossible to know what was real or what wasn’t; every act of forgiveness was a leap of faith.”

Texas Ranger Darren Matthews is finally starting to get his life together after the events of Bluebird, Bluebird.  He is back on the job.  If it at a desk, the time home is allowing him to repair his relationship with his wife, and he is doing important work on a federal-state task force building a case against the Aryan Brotherhood.  His drinking is under control.  The only hitch is his no-account mother blackmailing him, but everything really goes to shit when a boy goes missing on the Texas-Louisiana border.

Heaven, My Home is the second book in Locke’s Highway 59 Mystery series.

Short Review Roundup – Fiction edition

I occasionally run “short review roundup” posts over at the other blog so I can knock out a few reviews at a time rather than write at length.  I am running behind on my reviews here, and I recently read a few books that don’t quite fall into the Hillbilly Highways wheelhouse but that I think are worth talking about anyway.

Fiction: Last Girl Gone by J.G. Hetherton

Is the evil done to us irreparable?  Are we doomed to pay it forward?

Last Girl Gone is an assured debut, as much a thriller as a mystery (certainly effective as the former).  Young girls are starting to go missing in the small town of Hillsborough, North Carolina—just like they did decades before—and disgraced journalist Laura Chambers sees her way back out of her hometown.

Historic Occoneechee Speedway – not my pic

Fiction: Murder and Moonshine: A Mystery by Carol Miller

Murder and Moonshine is by no means a bad book or a bad mystery.  But it is also not an exceptional one in any way.

Country Noir: Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke

“The nobility is in the fight, son, in all things.”

Darren Matthews is a hard-drinking, black Texas Ranger.  His job and his marriage are hanging by a thread after a friend asked him for help and the other guy wound up dead.  He is still on suspension when he takes it on himself to, at an FBI buddy’s urging, head out of town to investigate the deaths of a local white woman and a black man passing through rural east Texas.

Bluebird, Bluebird is set in east Texas in the Piney Woods along Highway 59.  The copy describes it as “rural noir” and it was the winner of the 2018 Edgar Award for Best (mystery) Novel.  It works well enough as a mystery for me (but then I have never been a mystery fan).  It is fairly classed as country noir (my preferred term for the subgenre), although it fits somewhat uneasily.  But the two complement each other and make for a stronger book viewed with both aspects in mind.

Can’t-Wait Wednesday: Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke

Fresh off my review of Savage Season, I am back for another country noir set in East Texas.  Bluebird, Bluebird is thick with Texas Rangers and the blues and blood and bubbling racial tensions.  I am reading this now and I have thoughts!  But I am going to wait for the paperback to hit before I publish my review.  You can expect it to go live on August 22.

Bluebird, Bluebird won the 2018 Edgar Award for Best (mystery) Novel.

Can’t-Wait Wednesdays is hosted by Wishful Endings.