Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke

Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke

Published: September 10th, 2017 by Mulholland Books

Genre: Mystery, Crime Fiction

Format: Kindle, 320 Pages, Own

Rating: 4 stars

Publisher's Summary:

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.

My Thoughts:

I truly felt immersed in the heat and the long highway of the eastern Texas town of Lark. It's a place you can look up on Google Maps and travel along the highway to the small farm roads and small-town oppression. Darren Matthews, a Black Texas Ranger must wage his way through race and justice.

From the murders of an out-of-town Black northerner and a local White woman Locke interweaves the tug and pull of systemic racism and criminal justice in America. It's a slow-burn. We get to know Darren and why he's picked being a Ranger rather a lawyer. How his marriage is one the verge of collapse because he's chosen police work. He joins because of his Uncle William who pretty much raised him like a father. According to him "...the law would save us by protecting us--by prosecuting crimes against us as zealously as it prosecutes crimes against whites." But his other uncle Clayton, the defense lawyer, said: "the law is a lie black folks need protection from--a set of rules that were written against us from the time ink was first set to parchment."

The mystery of who Michael was and why he came down from Chicago to see Geneva in her tiny cafe off the side of the highway and how the murdered white woman Missy comes into is fantastic. Locke is able to weave a true history of race relations in that could be in any small southern town; systemic racism that cuts through generations.

Here are some quotes just to get a feel of what kind of writer Locke is:

"Most black folks living in Lark came from sharecropping families, trading their physical enslavement for the crushing debt that came with tenant farming, a leap from the frying pan into the fire, from the certainty of hell to the slow, hot torture of hope."

"Maybe justice was messier than Darren realized when he'd first pinned a badge to his chest; it was no better or worse than a sieve, a cheap net, a catch-as-catch-can system that gave the illusion of righteousness when really the need for tidy resolution trumped sloppy uncertainty any day."

If you love mystery, noir, crime fiction, and a realistic world of race and justice in America, Locke's books are absolutely must-reads.