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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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