Attica Locke has an incredible ability to expose the faultlines in communities and relationships. Throw in exceptional characters, compelling history, and her poignant accuracy in describing East Texas, and you're in for a fascinating ride that will keep you up past your bedtime.

Since I’m currently reading my second continuation of a series for 2019, despite my never-ending-commentary that I hate reading books in a series I figured it was well past time to finally write something up about this. (Still 40 reviews behind, though, so go me!) As soon as I heard there was going to be a sequel to Bluebird, Bluebird I wanted it. I will say that is not a selection that works well as a standalone, so if you are like me and kind of allergic to staying with the same folks for too long this might not be a winner for you. I will also admit that due to there being so much continuation of the first book’s storyline into the second the rating took a hit for me too. I don’t have a great memory, I read A LOT of books and I don’t re-read. That doesn’t always make for a winning recipe when it comes to books two, three and so-on (which is why I avoid them like the black plague). So why the exception here??? Well, mainly because Attica Locke is simply one of the best when it comes to putting you in a place. She is from the locale she writes about and you can tell. She knows where the bend is in the river and she knows who is going to live down yonder on any such spot of land – even if they are fictional. Her words aren’t wasted. They get you where she wants to take you and they do it efficiently.

And the stories? Well, I knew nothing going in to this aside from it was going to be about a missing child and a bunch of skinheads. My mind immediately assumed the child was black since I couldn’t figure out why Texas Ranger Darren Matthews would be sent down Highway 59 to deal with the Aryan Brotherhood, but then I discovered the child was white and Darren was sent to deal with the older residents of town (who were black) and that there was a whooooooooooooooooole lotta stuff going on back in the sticks.

The best compliment I can give to Attica Locke is that she reminds me a bit of Dennis Lehane. She writes a good mystery, she fills it with memorable characters, she’s not willing to get dark, no one is a saint - and most of all, she takes you there.

ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you, NetGalley!

Texas Ranger Darren Mathews is sent to the small lakeside community of Hopetown, ostensibly to investigate a missing child. Or maybe to find out more about his white supremacist family. But of course, he also has his own reasons for going...

Attica Locke is easily my favourite crime writer at the moment. The location is a huge part of the story, the lake, the blues, the history and the characters. And Darren, with his complicated relationships and far-from-perfect actions is a compelling main character. All the stars! (But I would recommend reading this in series order, starting with Bluebird Bluebird).

Enjoyed this book just as much as Locke's other book in the series, Bluebird, Bluebird. I would definitely class this as a new twist on the 'cosy mystery' genre. Although it does have adult themes and explores the history of racism, slavery, and land natives it is, however, it is a relatively mild thiller, focusing more on Texas life.
Still a great read and a series like no other.

Darren is a Texas Ranger. He is called in on a case to help find a young boy. As the case slowly develops, so do the racial undertones. He also finds a connection to a previous case. One, in which, he hoped would stay buried.

I enjoy a book where the main character is flawed. And Darren is definitely flawed. He has made plenty of bad choices and big mistakes. One big one from a previous investigation actually has him being blackmailed, by his mother, no less! Darren is such a “real” character with “real” troubles that I rooted for him to succeed. You will have to read the book to see how that worked out!

This is an intricate, twisted mystery with plenty of action thrown in. If you need a good book to immerse your self in. This is it!

I have only read one other Attica book. I must remedy that soon.

I received this novel from Serpent Tale Books for a honest review.

I wasn't sure if I would be able to get into this book, as I did not read the first, however, I LOVED it! Now I want to go back and read the original and any futures in this series!

This is a great book! I have read all of the books by Attica Locke and this one did not fail to impress me. This book was easy to read and the characters were easy to follow along with. This is a great book and a great story and I recommend this to anyone who wants to read a great book!

This series is excellent, and I can't wait to read more. Darren Mathews is right up there with Kristen Lepionka's Roxane Weary as one of my favorite flawed detectives. In this book (which is definitely not a standalone--you should read Bluebird, Bluebird first), we are a few months out from the events of the last book, and Darren is investigating the disappearance of the son of a white supremacist, with the goal of getting more information on the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. The setting is a small, swampy town in East Texas, and it's just as atmospheric, with a brilliant sense of place, as the last book. The story takes numerous twists and turns, and the mystery is good, but the best part is Darren. His moral compass is a bit skewed, and you can see the deep influence his feuding uncles, one a Texas Ranger and one a defense attorney, had on him, as he struggles between upholding the law and pursuing racial justice. He's also caught up on personal troubles with his wife, his best friend, his mother, and the alluring widow he met in the previous book. This series is so good, and and I highly recommend it to mystery readers.

There’s a bristling rage beneath the lyrical surface of Attica Locke’s latest novel, HEAVEN, MY HOME. The sequel to the Texas-raised author’s outstanding BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD – a book which deservedly achieved the rare feat of scooping major crime writing awards on both sides of the Atlantic, the Steel Dagger from the British CWA and the Edgar Award from the MWA – sees the return of black Texas Ranger Darren Matthews.

The events in this novel follow on closely from the climax of the previous Darren Matthews tale, and also come hard on the heels of the elections of Donald Trump. Locke doesn't shy away from tackling the rising spectre of white supremacy in the United States, as well as the shock many felt that the wider US electorate had somehow elected someone like Trump to the highest office in the land.

In HEAVEN, MY HOME, Mathews has taken a desk job analysing surveillance on the Aryan Brotherhood but returns to the field when the nine-year-old son of an imprisoned leader of the Texas chapter disappears. Confounding matters, the last person to see the boy was an irascible old black man. Can Matthews save an already-indoctrinated child while trying to take down the Brotherhood, during a time that a new incoming administration with little interest in such threats is preparing to ascend to the White House?

Locke brings the small towns and swampy waterways of east Texas to stunning life while delivering a powerful novel addressing some of the biggest issues of our time. Can those who've put self-interest ahead of their fellow man be forgiven? Has the arc of justice in recent decades been an illusion, or is the spike in white supremacy the last gasps of bigots whose time has long passed? But what damage is done in the meantime.

A superb tale that may be even better than the award-bedecked BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD.

Perhaps Locke will add another rare feat to her resume - a double-Edgar Award winner. For by now it’s very clear: Attica Locke is one of America’s greatest novelists, regardless of genre

Attica Locke does it again!
I read the first book in the Highway 59 series, Bluebird Bluebird earlier this year and loved it. The second book in the series Heaven, My Home draws you in immediately with the mysterious disappearance of a child. Locke does an excellent job weaving the descriptions of the East Texas landscape, characters and local history. The tension in the personal relationships the main character, Darren has with those around him is as thrilling as the mystery he sets out to solve. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to receive this arc from NetGalley and provide a review. I am looking forward to the next book in the Highway 59 series.

Attica Locke creates stories rich in setting and character and entwined with history. (Bluebird, Bluebird) The plot of her latest, HEAVEN, MY HOME, is not only intense but complex and multilayered. Levi, the nine-year-old son of an Aryan Brotherhood leader, goes missing. Texas Ranger Darren Matthews is assigned to find him. As crime novels go, that would be ordinary, except Matthews is black and must follow the law even when faced with legal and moral issues. One of the settings he’s called to, Hopetown, was created after the civil war for freed slaves. Now white supremacists live there too, making a living off people who are nostalgic for anti-bellum Texas.

Matthews comes into the assignment with personal problems, including a mother who doesn’t have his best interests at heart, a vulnerable marriage, and a past investigation that haunts him. As a character, he’s so fully fleshed out that I feel as if I know him, making his story the kind I yearn for as a reader.

I won’t go into any more plot details as other reviews have covered those. I do enjoy how Locke interweaves Texas history in the novel, plus pulls us into a world in 2016 that is more conflicted than it was a few decades ago. Like a Pandora’s Box of Bigots, the racists have become emboldened and don’t fear the law. Levi the nine-year-old is a bad actor, but questions arise for Matthews as well as the reader as Matthews must put aside his feelings and search for the boy. Should Levi be held to same standards as his racists’ relations? Is his hate conditioning or something more rooted in his genetic make-up?

Locke leans heavily on the idea of forgiveness. Should we always try to forgive, or are there times we cannot afford to forgive?

I’m always drawn to crime and thrillers that ask big, bold, and uneasy questions like these. Early in the novel, Matthews says:

“Maybe the rules had to be different. Maybe justice was no more a fixed concept than love was, and the poets and bluesmen knew the rules better than we did.”

Maybe so. Think about that for a minute before you dive into the novel because once you do, you’ll be too swept up in not only what happens, but what choices the characters must make. Walk in their boots. Experience a time of both past and present, times that make moral and legal choices so difficult.

“Heaven, My Home” is the second book in Attica Locke’s Highway 59 mystery series featuring Texas Ranger Darren Mathews, following the Edgar Award-winning first installment “Bluebird, Bluebird,” and I hope there will be many more to come, because this book is beautifully, even lyrically, written, with an interesting protagonist and a hard look at racial politics that is especially relevant today.

In a particularly gripping opening, 9-year-old Levi King, the son of a white supremacist, finds himself stranded alone on a malfunctioning boat in the middle of Caddo Lake in East Texas as night is falling. Just as Levi is starting to panic, however, he spots a boat moving slowly toward him and gratefully flags it down. Except that Levi doesn’t show up at home that night—and is still missing a week later. Meanwhile, Texas Ranger Darren Mathews has problems of his own. His mother, absent through most of his childhood, is suddenly a unwelcome part of his life again; his marriage is on precarious ground; and he has been benched to a desk job investigating the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas after being suspended during his last case. So when Darren’s boss asks him to travel east on Highway 59 to Jefferson, Texas, to investigate any links Levi’s disappearance might have to the Aryan Brotherhood, Darren jumps at the chance to get out of Houston. Soon, however, Darren, who is black, finds himself dealing with the same sorts of issues—racism and the disenfranchisement that results from it—that got him into trouble before, as he wades into a tangled morass of historical enmities that holds the key to Levi’s whereabouts.

This book has a very atmospheric “In the Heat of the Night” vibe to it—Darren’s badge earns him only the most minimal respect among the racist residents of Jefferson, and Jefferson’s outwardly friendly sheriff is more cooperative with the town’s rich white doyenne (who happens to be Levi King’s grandmother) than with Darren. Darren himself, moreover, is conflicted by the demands of his job—which often pits him against the black and minority communities where his fundamental loyalties lie—and by the temptation to use this new case to tie up some loose and very incriminating ends from his last one.

I should say that I haven’t yet read “Bluebird, Bluebird” and that, while it is certainly possible to read “Heaven, My Home” as a stand alone book, there are some plot and character points in it that would have been more meaningful to me had I started the series at the beginning, which would be my recommendation to future readers. But do start the series—it’s smart, atmospheric, and well-written, and is grappling with a lot more than simply “who did it.”

Thank you to NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for providing me with an ARC of this book in return for my honest review.

This book is a 2nd in a series and though I had read the first book I did not really remember it so that hurt my reading of this one. The storyline really carried over a lot. The other negative about the book is the ending. Much was not resolved. That being said Attica Locke is an excellent writer. She has taken on a very tough topic addressing issues of race right after the 2016 election in a very explicit manner. Anyone who supports Trump need not read this book. The pain of the main protagonist is well written and is not done in a manner typical of the tortured cop that we see so often. I enjoyed the book and hope she writes another in the series.

The second book in Attica Locke's Highway 59 series is another compelling read. Texas Ranger Darren Matthews is feeling the heat from decisions he made to protect an old family friend who is in the frame for the murder of racist thug, in the first novel of the series Bluebird, Bluebird. Now amidst pressure from his manipulative mother and the continuing investigation into the unsolved murder, Matthews must join the search for the missing child of a well known member of the Aryan Brotherhood in a deeply racist antebellum community..

Set against the backdrop of the beginning of the Trump administration and the subsequent increase in racially motivated crimes, this is a beautifully written, thought provoking read with a well rounded, realistic protagonist and a fast paced plot.

Heaven, My Home is the second in this excellent series by Attika Locke. This mystery is set in Texas and features Darren Matthews, an African American Texas Ranger. This one focuses on the disappearance of a 9 year old boy, who is the son of a convicted white supremacist. Darren gets involved in the investigation because this might be the opportunity to get more information about a white supremacist group. But his own emotions and sense of what’s right and wrong become complicated when the main suspect is an older African American man. Locke doesn’t shy away from complex contemporary politics and issues, and she delves into the complexity without being pedantic or didactic – in other words, Locke assumes her readers are intelligent and interested in the world – one of my favourite kinds of mysteries.

It’s worth reading #1 before reading this one, because Darren’s moral and emotional struggles carry through from book 1 to book 2. I sure hope there’s a #3 on the way.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me access to an advance copy.

An idiosyncratic, involving mystery, "Heaven, My Home" is the second outing for African-American Texas Ranger Darren Matthews. Battling his own recent murky past, he sets out to solve the mystery of the disappearance of a white boy, son of a jailed Aryan Brotherhood thug. Locke's tricky plot often seems a sidelight to Darren's quest, the fraught racial politics everywhere, and wonderful descriptions of Marion County, but I raced through the book, quite caught up in it. Authorial pacing ebbs and flows, and the writing style feels unusual. All in all, a sense of dislocation accompanied my reading but I can recommend the book to lovers of procedural mysteries.

Attica Locke is phenomenal. Her mysteries braid a few tropes of the genre but she also puts anti-black racism front and center in a way that I haven't seen done a whole lot. Walter Mosely's mysteries also put black lives front and center, but he does not prominently pit black people against white people in his plot arcs. Attica Locke does just that, in a way that makes her mysteries complex, riveting and very human.

The protagonist of this two-novel series is Darren Mathews, an embattled Texas ranger with a lucid understanding of the systemic injustices that affect black people and a much less lucid understanding of his place in all that. Mathews is also the product of a difficult childhood, so his personal issues get in the way quite a bit. I am entirely in love with the trope of the messed-up-but-right-hearted investigator, which I think is grounded in the idea that you can't really see other people's struggles unless you have struggles of your own.

I'm not black so I'm not sure that what I'm about to say is accurate but here's a stab at it. Mathews was abandoned by his mom and raised by two uncles. These two uncles instilled in him a great sense of rectitude: when it comes to the law you don't go greyzone, you don't bend the rules. Justice is justice. Based on what little representation of black life I have been exposed to in literature I have a feeling that this may be a black elders' stance; a profound dignity borne of faith, mostly. Again, I might be wrong. Darren is at loggerheads with this attitude and this seems to me the product of a new way of thinking of power. I think that all people on the wrong side of power are reframing their understanding of notions like "justice" and "the law" and realizing that they don't serve them. These notions, this understanding goes, are already framed in a way that perpetuates disadvantage, discrimination, and oppression.

It's fascinating to see Darren struggle with all this--with wanting to be a good cop and with wanting to be, hmm, a good cop. The latter is someone who needs to get into the muck of things and look at things from all angles. If the letter of the law doesn't fit, then maybe principled departures need to be taken.

There is bitterness and risk in this, but this is the moral struggle of our protagonist, and we like being along for the ride.

This novel also presents white supremacists. There are not two sides to white supremacy and neither Mathews nor Locke have any patience with it.

Maybe I'm making this novel sound intellectual or difficult. It is neither. It's a page-turner with secrets, old loyalties, and scary turns of events, and I found it magnificent.

Thank you Net Galley. A very well written book that explores the complexity of human nature and identity. who are we and how we form and experience social relationships. How do we reconcile our beliefs and our actions and duties. I started reading expecting a thriller/mystery and got that and much more. Superlative.

In Attica Locke's follow up to Bluebird, Bluebird, we join Texas Ranger Darren Matthews a few months after the events in Lark, East Texas and witness him playing nice with wife Lisa by working at a desk researching ways to identify members of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas and eradicate the "organisation". But chafing at Darren is the need to feel connected to his state and his people by being out in the field, living their lives with them and providing what help he can to balance the scales in the insidious opposition of blacks and whites in East Texas.
Perhaps he should have been careful what he wished for, because shortly after Darren decides he can't live in the stasis he's found himself in, there is a case in a small town not too far away of a missing white boy whose father is in prison for murder and is an ABT member, and whose stepfather is a wannabe white supremacist with no guts to do more than talk trash, dabble in drugs and recruit his neighbours to do his dirty work for him. Darren is assigned the case because the only suspect in the boy's disappearance is a black man who owns the land they both live on.

There is so much more to this book plot wise, which is a great ride, but the real beauty of this book comes from the spectacular writing. The descriptions of Texas and of the characters are so beautiful. Darren's internal struggle between wanting to not only destroy but also punish racism is exacerbated by the recent election outcome, and his awareness that his outlook is not the same for white people and black people that may be objectively in the same situation.

Really enjoyed this read, and look forward to more in the Highway #59 series!

Thanks to NetGalley and The Publisher for this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Black Texas Ranger Darren Mathews investigates the disappearance of 9-year-old Levi King - the son from a family of white supremacists, who are his real target.

Set in small East Texas towns which provide the eerie back drop to this thought provoking and multi-layered and tense crime novel. This book really delves into divided loyalties and obligations Darren faces in his quest to deliver justice within the bounds of his own moral compass. I really enjoyed that and the whodunit aspect too.

Being the second book to feature Texas Ranger Darren Mathews (and hopefully not the last), it was nice to see continuation of the personal story lines and find out more background to the recurring characters, but think enough details were given in this book to be able to enjoy it as a stand alone novel.

Long may the series (I hope) continue.