Guide Me Home

Starred review from July 15, 2024
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.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from August 1, 2024
In this series' third outing (after Heaven My Home, 2019), Darren Mathews resigns from the Texas Rangers after his estranged mother, Bell, stirs up an evidence-tampering investigation targeting him. Bell arrives at his East Texas farmhouse with an unwelcome apology, pleading for him to investigate the disappearance of Sera Fuller, the lone Black sister in the sorority whose house Bell cleans. Darren responds with a bridge-burning drinking binge. Later, haunted by his girlfriend's warning that he's clouded by his distrust of Bell, Darren reluctantly tracks Bell down to get the details. Bell claims that Sera was bullied until she disappeared and that all of Sera's belongings, including her purse and phone, were discarded in the sorority's dumpster. Campus police report that Sera isn't missing, and her parents refuse to talk. But Sera is nowhere to be found, and something is off about Thornhill, the model, factory-owned enclave where her family lives and works. As Darren's grudging investigative partnership with Bell gains traction, he learns reality-shifting truths about his own story that chip away at his distrust. Through exceptional writing, pivotal character evolution, and a baffling mystery, Locke confronts the injustices surrounding missing and murdered Black women and the tempting dangers of predatory business interests.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 2, 2024
Edgar winner Locke concludes her Highway 59 trilogy (after Heaven, My Home) with an uneven look at Black Texas Ranger Darren Matthews’s efforts to track down a missing sorority girl. Darren’s estranged mother, Bell, has been causing more than her typical amount of trouble: after learning that Darren tampered with the inquiry into the murder of Aryan Brotherhood member Ronnie Malvo to protect the likely culprit—an elderly Black man—she blackmailed him, forcing Darren to coerce a confession from one of Malvo’s colleagues. Now, the DA has come knocking at Darren’s door, attempting to indict him for obstructing justice. Meanwhile, Bell shows up to Darren’s home with a lead on a new case: Black college student Sera Fuller has disappeared from the school where Bell works, shortly after filing a police report for unspecified bullying. At first, Darren can’t decide whether to trust his mother’s lead, but after learning more about Fuller’s family history, he decides to investigate, pushing through skepticism from his colleagues. Locke’s prose remains elegant, but a surplus of backstory threatens to swallow the narrative, and she ties one too many tidy bows on Darren’s personal troubles—particularly his tumultuous marriage—for the conclusion to land with the desired sense of realism. This is a disappointment. Agent: Richard Abate, 3 Arts Entertainment.