We’ve missed Attica Locke’s deft and wise way with the crime novel. We want more.
Locke resolves the loose ends of her award-winning trilogy of novels set along East Texas’ Highway 59—beginning with Bluebird, Bluebird (2017) and Heaven, My Home (2019)—in ways at once gratifying and unsettling.
The year 2019 finds Donald Trump still in the White House and Texas Ranger Darren Mathews struggling toward as much peace of mind as a proud yet vulnerable Black man can find. What’s kept him especially vulnerable is the looming threat of indictment by an ambitious district attorney for obstructing justice in the murder of a white nationalist, the principal problem being that Darren knows he’d be found guilty. “He wasn’t entirely sure he didn’t deserve to be indicted. Wasn’t sure either that he didn’t deserve a medal.” Either way, Darren decides he can no longer function as a Ranger under this cloud, so he turns in the badge he’d once proudly worn. When he comes home after resigning, he finds his estranged mother, Bell, waiting for him. Darren has many reasons for not wanting to talk to her, beginning with an assortment of resentments from his childhood and culminating with the fact that she gave the weapon used in the aforementioned murder to the DA. “I was trying to protect you,” she insists, which Darren doesn’t believe. Nor does he believe that she’s sober after years of alcoholism. But she’s not here to stir up old grievances. Bell’s asking him to find a Black student at Stephen F. Austin College who disappeared from a sorority house where Bell’s been working as a maid. At first, Darren’s too wound up over his mother coming into his life again to even consider her request, so wound up that he tumbles into his own nightmarish round of hard drinking, but he eventually decides to take the case. And there’s much more to it than anybody connected with the school or the girl’s all-white sorority bothers to acknowledge. The trail leads to a town called Thornhill, which is dominated by a family-run corporation with deep political connections and vaguely sinister control over its employees. This case may lack something of the edgy, violent nature of the crimes in the two earlier books. But Locke’s main order of business here is with Darren’s reckoning and reconciliation with a past as full of deceit and false leads as even the most elaborate whodunit.
We’ve missed Attica Locke’s deft and wise way with the crime novel. We want more.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780316494618
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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