Attica Locke pens a poignant love letter to the lazy red-dirt roads and Piney Woods that serve as a backdrop to a noir thriller as murky as the bayous and bloodlines that thread through the region ... Locke stitches a tale of murder and bloodlust, forbidden love, family ties and a violent racial history that bleed into the narrative of East Texas like the mournful moan of a Lightnin' Hopkins song ... just when you think this race-centered saga will play out like most others, Locke shows off her chops as a superb storyteller who spent three years in the writers' room of Empire. She is adept at crafting characters who don't easily fit the archetypes of good and evil, but exist in the thick grayness of humanness, the knotty demands of loyalties and the baseness of survival. Locke holds up the mirror of the racial debate in America and shows us how the light bends and fractures what is right, wrong and what simply is the way it is — but perhaps not as it should be.
A rich sense of place and relentless feeling of dread permeate Attica Locke’s heartbreakingly resonant new novel about race and justice in America ... an emotionally dense and intricately detailed thriller, roiling with conflicting emotions steeped in this nation’s troubled past and present ... 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.
A native of Houston, [Locke] knows her territory, and while every element of the story works, the dialogue is fantastic ... Bluebird, Bluebird is Southern noir at its best, an intricately plotted, character-driven story with a solid twist at the end. There's enough going on—Aryan Brotherhood ties, illicit sexual attraction, and tons of shared family history—to keep readers riveted even if they think they’ve figured everything out. I bet two peach fried pies they have not; Locke is deft at misdirection.
... Locke is a brisk writer with a sharp eye for the subtleties of how rural white Southerners tend to act as if their little towns belong to them — and react harshly to black independence.
Many a fictional police detective is so devoted to work that he (or she) becomes estranged from a spouse. Darren Mathews, the black Texas Ranger at the heart of Attica Locke’s fourth and perhaps best novel, Bluebird, Bluebird, is no exception ... The award-winning Ms. Locke is a wonderful stylist, able to conjure vivid impressions with a single phrase ... The author is just as good at indicating the nuances of her characters’ moral challenges.
Attica Locke’s fourth novel is based on an unusual premise ... Here we have a mystery perplexing enough to carry a wayward, whisky-drinking detective on a journey through the racial faultlines that have defined his own experience ... is both chilling and palpable, the level of race hate and discrimination that Locke portrays in her locales...is as well a more nuanced observation of racial tensions and relationships, which despite the slowness of this novel — it is gripping more in its philosophical than in its detective line of inquiry — seem also to be at the heart of Locke’s concerns ...most satisfying about this crime novel is its use of the crime as a device with which to explore something much larger and universal, and to do so with copious amounts of space.
Locke writes in a blues-infused idiom that lends a strain of melancholy and a sense of loss to her lyrical style. Given the characters in her novel, that voice comes naturally ... As for the murder mystery, it’s tied up with buried feelings and secret betrayals that cross racial lines and go back generations. 'There were things you just didn’t do in Lark, Texas,' Locke tells us. 'And picking apart bloodlines was one of them.' So enjoy your stay in Lark; but don’t ask anyone 'Who’s your daddy?' and expect to get out of town alive.
Texas Ranger Darren Mathews knows he's exposing himself to a world of trouble when he heads into rural East Texas, where he has deep family roots, to investigate a pair of seemingly connected murders: that of a black lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman ... Named after a John Lee Hooker song, Attica Locke's stupendous fourth novel is suffused with the blues. Pushing her classic noir plot deep into history and culture, the Houston native sings her own unshakable, timeless lament. Streaked with wit and hard-earned wisdom, Bluebird, Bluebird soars.
The novel is as much murder mystery as it is a meditation on race and on being loyal to one’s roots. It takes its title from a John Lee Hooker song and reflects the bluesman’s griefs. At the heart of the plot are family entanglements, both illicit and openly exposed like wounds. The pacing is expertly measured — though there are great surprises, they feel warranted and true … Locke presents a world in which the divide between black law enforcers and white officials is wide. Here, differing notions of justice — who is deserving of protection, what constitutes fairness in law and who is entitled to have those laws bent on their behalf — can mean the difference between life and death. It is an anatomy of the thin blue line, and its truths are bracing.
The term ‘tangled web’ gets thrown around a lot with these kind of novels, and for a moment I reflexively reached out to type that tired phrase before realizing that doing so would be doing Bluebird a disservice. Locke’s novel deals with such a small cast of characters that astute readers could probably guess who’s involved in the solution to the mystery midway through, but the plot is in no way lessened by not having an out-of-nowhere arrival in the third act. Instead, Locke uses history to add depth in a way that’s all the more compelling for how fundamentally simple it can be … Learning the full extent of the complicated relationships between characters is the best part of the book — Locke has a wonderful grasp of how to tell a story about the past.
Two bodies have been discovered near Geneva Sweet’s café in Lark, Texas: a black man and a white woman. You may think you know where Locke will take you given that premise, and you’d be a little right. Nobody’s ‘thinking about that black man … not when a white girl comes up dead.’ But you’d also be a lot wrong. Here’s why. This is a layered portrait of a black man confronting his own racial ambivalence and ambition told with a pointed and poignant bluesy lyricism … Locke’s novel is America ‘telling on itself.’ Listen up.
Locke, having stockpiled an acclaimed array of crime novels, deserves a career breakthrough for this deftly plotted whodunit whose writing pulses throughout with a raw, blues-inflected lyricism.
