"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."—Kirkus Reviews, STARRED
"Exceptional writing, pivotal character evolution, and a baffling mystery."—Booklist, STARRED
Praise for Bluebird, Bluebird
Winner of the 2018 Edgar Award for Best Novel
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
A Washington Post 10 Best Thrillers and Mysteries of 2017
A Kirkus Best Mysteries and Thrillers of 2017
A Financial Times Best Book of the Year
Best book of the year from Vulture, The Strand Magazine, Southern Living, Bolo Books, Publisher's Weekly, Book Riot, The Guardian, Lit Hub, The Boston Globe, Dallas News, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Minnesota Public Radio, Texas Monthly, The Daily Beast, and the South Florida Sun Sentinel
"A quick course in plotting and nimble characterizations rooted in a vividly evoked setting"—Nicole Lamy, New York Times Book Review
"An emotionally dense and intricately detailed thriller, roiling with conflicting emotions steeped in this nation's troubled past and present. . . . A rich sense of place and relentless feeling of dread permeate Attica Locke's heartbreakingly resonant new novel about race and justice in America. . . . Bluebird, Bluebird is no simple morality tale. Far from it. It rises above "left and right" and "black and white" and follows the threads that inevitably bind us together, even as we rip them apart."—James Endrst, USA Today
"In Bluebird, Bluebird Attica Locke had both mastered the thriller and exceeded it. Ranger Darren Mathews is tough, honor-bound, and profoundly alive in corrupt world. I loved everything about this book."—Ann Patchett
"Attica Locke's Bluebird, Bluebird reads like a blues song to East Texas with all its troubles over property, race, and love. Taut where it has to be to keep a murder investigation on its toes, this novel is also languid when you need to understand just what would keep a black woman or man in a place where so much troubled history lies. This novel marks Love's (and Hatred's) comings and goings amongst black and white, and all the shades between. Locke's small town murder investigation reveals what lies at the heart of America's confusion over race."—Walter Mosley, author of Down the River unto the Sea
"Lyrical, elemental, and pulls no punches, exposing racial tensions past and present while a killer blues soundtrack plays perpetually in the background."—Boston Globe
"Attica Locke knows Texas, a place that has shaped both her characters and her life. Locke's new book, Bluebird, Bluebird, is evidence of her deep knowledge and love of her community and a deep talent for writing hype thrillers that also manage to be timely, relevant and keenly insightful."—Joe Ide, author of IQ and Righteous
"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."—BookRiot's Unusual Suspects
★ 2024-06-15
Locke resolves the loose ends of her award-winning trilogy of novels set along East Texas’ Highway 59—beginning withBluebird, Bluebird (2017) andHeaven, 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.
