The New York Times Book Review - Marilyn Stasio
A little boy nicks his grandfather's skiff and ventures out alone on Caddo Lake, a "wetland maze" of "bayous, tributaries and inlets like a tangle of snakes" …He soon gets lost, and so do we—in the bewitching story and luscious language of Heaven, My Home…The story has legs, the characters have character, and the dialogue has a wonderful regional tang. But it's Locke's descriptive language that gets me.
Wall Street Journal Tom Nolan
Atmospheric . . . Ms. Locke, a canny storyteller, ties up enough strands to satisfy readers, while leaving enough loose ends to make us eager for Ranger Mathews's next adventure in the Lone Star State.
BookPage
Few suspense novelists display a better grip of political and racial divides than Attica Locke, and she spins a hell of a good story as well, introducing characters and locales you will want to visit again and again.”
AudioFile
JD Jackson needs the range of a grand piano to do justice to Attica Locke’s East Texas, and his skills and appealing baritone have it covered…Jackson makes these flawed, believable characters a pleasure to love or hate. Add some antebellum fantasy tourist trap fraudsters, and you have a distinctly uncozy puzzle for our time, beautifully performed.”
Guardian [UK]
Heaven, My Home is a propulsive and compelling novel [with] passages of gorgeous lyricism, with loving, elegiac evocations of Texas set alongside extended meditations on displacement, reconciliation and forgiveness, and on what 'home' means. Locke suggests that being black in America has meant a constant, disorienting search for terra firma, fighting to claim some piece of the 'fields and prairies that we once tilled until our backs broke and bled", and that this feeling has returned with terrible urgency, or perhaps that it never left.'
San Francisco Chronicle
Attica Locke's novel is masterful. It's a quick read, not in the sense that it is short, but that it goes - and goes fast. It's a page-turner in every way.
NPR "Fresh Air"
Timely and evocative.
Boston Globe
With her usual aplomb, Locke tackles history and its all-too-real emotional fallout in this splendid follow-up.
Booklist (starred review)
This is a beautifully written and instantly gripping crime novel.”
Associated Press Oline Cogdill
Locke skillfully packs Heaven, My Home with realistic and, at times, uncomfortable situations as she depicts complicated characters. In Darren, Locke has fearlessly shaped a character that constantly walks a tightrope of being a good man with a quest for justice and being an extremely flawed person. . . . [Locke] once again excels in her superior storytelling.
People
Captivating.
Texas Observer
Locke doubles down on one of the most interesting characters from the trilogy’s first volume.”
Financial Times [UK]
[Locke is] the most celebrated African-American writer of crime fiction. Although her books are about the black experience in the US, they are universal in scope.
New York Times
[A] bewitching story and luscious language…The action is tense and the characters have character, but it’s Locke’s descriptions of this ‘little piece of heaven’ that will make you swoon.”
Shelf Awareness
Both a fascinating, smartly plotted mystery and a pertinent picture of the contemporary United States…This scintillating murder mystery, set in Trump-era East Texas, with a black main cast and racial concerns, is gripping, gorgeously written and relevant.”
Washington Post Madhulika Sikka
[Locke] has proved that there's demand for stories about black characters. . . . Her books, categorized as mystery or crime, are also unabashedly about black experiences, examining the legacy of black history in the context of modern politics and culture. The crime she really concerns herself with is an existential one: the legacy of America's original sin. The protagonists in her novels are mostly black men, and she writes with the authenticity of a lived experience.
Metro Style Philip Cu-Unjieng
Locke is adept at making her crime fiction transcend and become a powerful tool of social commentary, writing about race relations in the Deep South today.
Seattle Times
Locke's beautifully written crime fiction (which also includes "Pleasantville," "Black Water Rising," and "The Cutting Season") have a remarkable immediacy—you breathe with the characters and walk in their paths.
Buzzfeed
Locke's new novel is a mystery ripe for this age. . . . What makes Locke's mysteries so good is her ability to conjure up a mood with vivid prose. Her depiction of Texas is so evocative you can practically hear the beer cans cracking open and smell the swamp water.
From the Publisher
Both a fascinating, smartly plotted mystery and a pertinent picture of the contemporary United States, Heaven, My Home is refreshing, dour and thrilling all at once. Readers will be anxious for more of Ranger Darren Mathews. This scintillating murder mystery, set in Trump-era East Texas, with a black main cast and racial concerns, is gripping, gorgeously written and relevant."—Shelf Awareness
Philadelphia Inquirer
Riveting.
Wall Street Journal
Atmospheric.”
BookPage (starred review)
Few suspense novelists display a better grip of political and racial divides than Attica Locke, and she spins a hell of a good story as well, introducing characters and locales you will want to visit again and again.
starred review Booklist
This is a beautifully and instantly gripping crime novel. . . . Locke is one of the emerging stars of crime fiction.
BookRiot
Locke is brilliant at creating tense mysteries where the setting is as alive, and important, as the characters without distracting-but rather enhancing-the mystery element. You get history, a great mystery, smart twists, rich characters, and a deep exploration of the justice-and injustice-system of our country.
|Los Angeles Times
HEAVEN, MY HOME may be complex, but it's worth every blistering word Locke puts on the page. . . . One of the most affecting mysteries of the year.
O Magazine
In this scalp-prickling encore to her Edgar-winning Bluebird, Bluebird, Locke brings back intrepid Texas Ranger Darren Matthews . . . a gumbo of race and class prejudices captured in vivid detail.
CrimeReads Sheena Kamal
Here, antebellum sympathies abound, and the current political landscape in which the novel is set makes this a heartfelt read on race relations in the south.
NPR
Locke knows how to write a mystery novel that stings…Readers can rejoice that there are has plenty of volumes possible in the future of a mystery series with atmosphere, depth, and boundless compassion for its characters.”
Chicago Tribune
Pulse-pounding.
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2019-07-01
The redoubtable Locke follows up her Edgar-winning Bluebird, Bluebird (2017) with an even knottier tale of racism and deceit set in the same scruffy East Texas boondocks.
It's the 2016 holiday season, and African American Texas Ranger Darren Matthews has plenty of reasons for disquiet besides the recent election results. Chiefly there's the ongoing fallout from Darren's double murder investigation involving the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. He and his wife are in counseling. He's become a "desk jockey" in the Rangers' Houston office while fending off suspicions from a district attorney who thinks Darren hasn't been totally upfront with him about a Brotherhood member's death. (He hasn't.) And his not-so-loving mother is holding on to evidence that could either save or crucify him with the district attorney. So maybe it's kind of a relief for Darren to head for the once-thriving coastal town of Jefferson, where the 9-year-old son of another Brotherhood member serving hard time for murdering a black man has gone missing while motorboating on a nearby lake. Then again, there isn't that much relief given the presence of short-fused white supremacists living not far from descendants of the town's original black and Native American settlers—one of whom, an elderly black man, is a suspect in the possible murder of the still-missing boy. Meanwhile, Darren's cultivating his own suspicions of chicanery involving the boy's wealthy and imperious grandmother, whose own family history is entwined with the town's antebellum past and who isn't so fazed with her grandson's disappearance that she can't have a lavish dinner party at her mansion. In addition to her gifts for tight pacing and intense lyricism, Locke shows with this installment of her Highway 59 series a facility for unraveling the tangled strands of the Southwest's cultural legacy and weaving them back together with the volatile racial politics and traumatic economic stresses of the present day. With her confident narrative hands on the wheel, this novel manages to evoke a portrait of Trump-era America—which, as someone observes of a pivotal character in the story, resembles "a toy ball tottering on a wire fence" that "could fall either way."
Locke's advancement here is so bracing that you can't wait to discover what happens next along her East Texas highway.
