Five years have passed since Attica Locke published Heaven, My Home, her second novel about Black Texas Ranger Darren Mathews, but the writer always knew she was going to revisit his story.

“I left it on a cliffhanger,” she admits via Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. “You can’t do that. It’s not fair. The beauty of writing a series in the way I wanted to, you could leave all these dangling questions you can answer later. And it was time to find the answers to those questions.”

Also the author of the novels The Cutting Season, Pleasantville, and Black Water Rising, Locke started the Highway 59 series—named for the road stretching north through rural East Texas—with 2017’s Bluebird, Bluebird. Over two compelling books, Darren Mathews faced off with creeps, criminals, racists, his family’s past—and his own darker nature.

In Guide Me Home (Mulholland Books/Little, Brown, Sept. 3), the last of the trilogy, it’s still 2019. Darren has turned in his badge but is drawn into the disappearance of Sera, a Black college student. He must also unravel the mystery of the community Sera’s family calls home: Thornhill, a modern-day factory town that claims to provide everything from housing to medical care for its employees. Its ominously responsive security force suggests a different agenda.

Locke had originally envisioned “six or seven” Highway 59 novels but found herself delayed by the pandemic and her job as a television writer and producer on such projects as Empire, Little Fires Everywhere, and the miniseries When They See Us, about the Central Park Five.

Now, she’s decided to take a step in a new direction. A big part of Guide Me Home is Darren coming to terms with his troubled mother, whose actions have threatened his career, and the repercussions of his own personal and professional mistakes.

She’s not sure if readers will follow her but hopes they will.

“I was afraid readers would want shoot’em-up bang-bangs,” she says. “I knew I wanted to write a different kind of crime novel. The mystery I was most interested in was between Darren and his mother. I was OK with this book moving at a different pace. It’s about being invested at the level of the heart.”

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you decide to close out the series after three books?

My feelings began to change about law enforcement and guns. This series became a treatise on the Trump era. When I wrote Bluebird, Bluebird, he hadn’t been elected. He was just a candidate. Nobody thought we’d be where we are now.

So he’s elected, and I seem like a Cassandra and prescient because of the nature of the book. It’s about a Black Ranger working around issues of the Aryan Brotherhood. There was no way to get around what was happening to the country. I want to continue to write about this era in our country’s history, but maybe in a different way. I can’t attack it from the point of reverence for guns and violence.

So are you done writing crime fiction?

I don’t want people to think I’m done with crime fiction! It’s this particular character having a hard time with it. But one of the most interesting things was when my husband read the book and said, “It’s as if your protagonist wants out of this genre.”

Why is writing about social justice important to you?

It’s the air I breathe. It’s just what comes out. I’m interested in politics from the point of view of distribution of power. What’s funny is that even in my TV work it’s there. I’m in a development phase, working with my sister on developing shows about real estate, and the themes that come out are: Who owns land? They have power. I am just naturally drawn to looking at the distribution of power.

What was it like to write the character of Sera’s father, a Black man who sees Donald Trump as a savior?

I tiptoed up to it. I was definitely trying to understand how your psychology can make you a true believer in the thing that is your undoing. We talk about it from a class perspective, where people vote against their own economic interest to align themselves with an economic population they don’t belong to. I took that and extrapolated race. Trump is lying about how many Black followers he has, but he has some, and most are men.

How did you come up with Thornhill, the factory town that claims to have its residents’ best interests at heart but doesn’t?

I had an idea early on for a Highway 59 book set at the border, about labor and factories, and I had read about the harrowing work of meat processing. I can’t say where I made the leap, but I’ve seen TikToks from young people saying, “One of these days we’re going to live at Target.” That’s the very thing Thornhill is. If government fails everybody, that’s when capitalism will swoop in. People are so desperate to be cared for as citizens, they’re willing to exchange any idea of building wealth for medical care. If building wealth isn’t possible, forget it. People would give up a lot simply to have basic human rights like medical care.

Will we see Darren in another setting some day?

There’s hope in the ending—him saying, “There will be a fight and I will join the fight, but I don’t know that I can do it this way as a man with a badge who lies and manipulates and does things that I accuse other people of doing.” So you never know. Scott Turow did a sequel to Presumed Innocent!

Darren could come back, but this era of his life is coming to a close. We don’t know what the rest will be. It mirrors a part of me. It’s very hard on the other side of the multiple shootings, on the other side of George Floyd, to revere gun violence. And that’s Darren’s job. He’s not only wrestling with that but also wrestling with the dangers of how easy it is for people in authority to lie. What kind of moral rot does that lead to? That’s what we’re seeing, the prospect of electing a liar who says, “The truth is whatever I want it to be.”

Do you hope to keep writing novels and working in television?

Here’s the thing: I happen to be able to do both, but I wish I only did one thing. It’s weird going back and forth. They’re so different. I love the solitude of writing a book, but working with other people is a lot of fun, even when it’s difficult. It’s like the writers bring in symphonic horns here, and costume design brings in the drums, and it makes a gorgeous symphony. It’s really awesome to watch that happen. But if I had my druthers, I would make a couple of great shows that can have legs, and once I get my daughter through college, I want to live in a Nancy Meyers movie and write from 10 to 3, then go pick sea glass on the beach.

Connie Ogle is a writer in Florida.