Heaven, My Home is a rich, complex puzzle, with layers of characters ... Locke's absorbing prose, in a third person very close to Darren, keeps the reader well abreast of all the crisscrossing loyalties and betrayals intrinsic to these East Texas woods ... There is a warmth and intimacy to the portrayal of Darren's many internal struggles. This is a protagonist to love and sympathize with, although he is far from perfect ... 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 is a beautifully written and instantly gripping crime novel; Darren Matthews is brutally honest both in his troubled personal life, as he deals with a deteriorating marriage, and on the job, as he faces down both casual hatred and the more virulent variety promulgated by the Aryan Brotherhood.
It's a testament to Locke's skill as a novelist that, while a mystery plays out, she's able to keep all of Ranger Mathews's other life travails relevant ... It's not that Locke goes easy on racists or bigots or ignorant types; it's that she wants to demonstrate how their idiocy can mask deeper erosion of a part of the world she clearly loves. Deep East Texas and its Highway 59 include some of the few places in the United States where free black societies took hold and flourished ... The world of Highway 59 contains multitudes, rich and poor and booksmart and horse-sense smart and of many races and ethnicities. 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. Attica Locke combines first-class procedural action with wise contemplation on our country's modern divides. Heaven, My Home should be on any mystery lover's TBR pile this fall.
Edgar Award winner Locke is definitely worth following, here presenting a well-crafted mystery that evokes a steamy east Texas and the racial tensions inherent in small Southern towns.
... 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.
A troubled marriage, a missing child, a tormented investigator: These ingredients could’ve resulted in a book full of crime-novel cliches. But thankfully, Locke doubles down on one of the most interesting characters from the trilogy’s first volume ... It hardly seems possible, considering the complexity with which she rendered Lark, Texas’, musical and culinary culture in Bluebird, Bluebird, but place serves an even larger role in Heaven, My Home. Her atmospheric descriptions...would be an artfully creepy backdrop for any mystery, but the setting here is doing much more ... Locke isn’t exploring cringe-worthy micro-aggressions in this novel; the racism here is blatant and seemingly hard-wired into the fabric of life ... It isn’t easy to look at the world through Darren’s point of view, but it is powerful and devastatingly real ... the novel isn’t perfect—there are unnecessary repetitions, as though Locke doesn’t always trust readers to pick something up the first time ... Ultimately, Heaven, My Home is a novel about secrets ... It’s a thrilling mystery, yes, but it’s also a powerful meditation on what it means to be human in these frightening times.
... [a] thoughtful mystery ... has the kind of vivid settings (a spooky bayou, an old hotel heavy on red velvet) and morally complicated characters that will be familiar to viewers of prestige television. If there’s a flaw, it’s that the book can feel overstuffed at times. Midway through the story, a second, barely seen character disappears, and the ultimate fate of this person is treated with a shrug by both the other characters and the author. A subplot involving Darren’s wife, Lisa, and his friend, Greg, never seems to connect with the larger plot, though perhaps it’s setting the stage for a future installment in the Highway 59 series ... Those who dive into this timely mystery undoubtedly will want to find out what Locke has in store for readers next.
The plot of Heaven, My Home may be complex, but it’s worth every blistering word Locke puts on the page ... Locke makes us understand Ranger Darren Mathews, even forgive him as he tries to find forgiveness for various characters in this riveting novel. That alone makes it one of the most affecting mysteries of the year.
Across...disparate projects, Locke’s work has been marked by a commitment to character and plots that delve into ugly and underexplored racial truths. Her latest, thankfully, is no different ... The extended scope serves the novel well; Heaven, My Home takes Bluebird’s interlocking histories and expands the concept both personally and professionally to build a denser novel with a larger cast of characters than before. Locke is deft enough to keep it working structurally and avoid chaos, though the sheer number of subplots means that some feel like they’re deliberately left open for further exploration in a sequel ... If Bluebird hinged on the idea that full knowledge/accounting of a previously unknown past can lead to understanding in the present, Heaven, My Home suggests that even a fully understood and comprehensible past doesn’t always bring clarity in the present day. Heaven, My Home presents different ways of moving forward, but ultimately abstains from suggesting we can know for sure what the right path is ... what makes Heaven, My Home a success is Locke’s willingness to explore what exactly it feels like when you’re wondering where you’ll land.
Dripping with atmosphere and laced with issues of identity, race, and heritage, Heaven, My Home is a powerful follow-up to Bluebird, Bluebird ... Some of the threads from Heaven, My Home connect back to Bluebird, Bluebird, and Locke doesn’t go out of her way to hold the hands of those who are starting the series with Heaven. With that small caution, Heaven, My Home is a well-wrought novel in the hands of a master storyteller.
It’s a very good book, but those are around. It’s a very good commentary on contemporary politics, but those are around too, even if it takes some sifting. What Locke does so expertly is to bring the personal and the political into balance, without ever, for an instant, sacrificing one to the other. She doesn’t ask her characters, many of them black, to be anything but themselves. That means they are on occasion spectacular or awful, on occasion deceptive or heroic, and frequently somewhere in the muddle in between (the place where most of us live). At the same time, they very definitely live political lives, because when your skin is dark in America, your existence is political of sad, choiceless necessity. The result is profound: a novel about crime, politics, and race whose first and only allegiance is to the real human texture of life. You could wish we lived in a culture (of arts, of politics) in which that didn’t feel special or unusual. But as Locke makes clear in numerous subtle ways throughout the book, we don’t, and we may be getting farther away from it rather than closer ... Locke is a writer gifted and discerning enough to make that debate seem meaningless.
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 ... Locke’s advancement here is so bracing that you can’t wait to discover what happens next along her East Texas highway.
...[a] searing sequel ... Matthew’s legal jeopardy from a prior case hovers over the action, but Locke makes the complex backstory accessible. This one’s another Edgar contender.
