Bluebird, Bluebird
by Attica Locke
Summary
Darren Mathews is a Black Texas Ranger raised by twin uncles who embodied the region's two answers to being a Black man in law country, one a Ranger, one a defence lawyer, and the novel catches him suspended, badge under review, marriage strained, drinking more than he admits, when a favour sends him up Highway 59 to Lark: population barely three digits, one cafe, one icehouse bar, and two bodies pulled from the same bayou in a week. The first was Michael Wright, a Black lawyer from Chicago passing through; the second, days later, Missy Dale, a local white woman. The town, the sheriff and the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas chapter that runs the icehouse would all prefer the arithmetic left alone, because East Texas knows how this story is supposed to be told: a Black man's death asks no questions, a white woman's answers them.
Locke sets the investigation in Geneva Sweet's cafe, the Black community's parlour, fried pies and Freddie King on the jukebox, where the county's real history is archived in what nobody says to strangers, and runs Mathews between the two establishments, cafe and icehouse, each with its secrets about the other. The solution reaches back through generations of entanglement, blood both spilled and shared, the county's white and Black families joined by everything their mythology denies, and Mathews's own reckoning, with the badge, the bottle and what justice costs in his home country, closes the book pointed north up the highway.
Around three hundred and twenty pages, blues structured and exact.
Best for readers who want the rural procedural made to carry the whole weight of Texas history, with a Ranger hero built for the contradiction.
Historical Context & Significance
Bluebird, Bluebird won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2018 and the Anthony with it, and its arrival was generational: Attica Locke, already an Edgar nominee for her Houston debut and a writer producer on Empire, built in Darren Mathews the Black Texas lawman rare in the genre's long Ranger mythology, and the reviews received the book as the overdue integration of two traditions, the highway blues and the police procedural.
Highway 59 is family geography, Locke's people distributed along it for generations, and the series continued down the road, Heaven, My Home taking Mathews into Trump era Caddo Lake and Guide Me Home closing the trilogy; her sister Tembi's memoir fame and her own screen work, When They See Us among it, made the Lockes a small industry.
The title is John Lee Hooker's blues, the cafe jukebox doing the book's theming; the Edgar put the song into the award's permanent record.