WINNER OF THE CWA IAN FLEMING STEEL DAGGER AWARD
WINNER OF THE EDGAR AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL
‘Thoughtful, piercing storytelling with the power to transport’ – FINANCIAL TIMES
‘An expertly plotted triple whodunit’ – SUNDAY TIMES
Southern fables usually go the other way around. A white woman is killed or harmed in some way, real or imagined, and then, like the moon follows the sun, a black man ends up dead.
But when it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules – a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger working the backwoods towns of Highway 59, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about his home state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home.
So when allegiance to his roots puts his job in jeopardy, he is drawn to a case in the small town of Lark, where two dead bodies washed up in the bayou. First a black lawyer from Chicago and then, three days later, a local white woman, and it’s stirred up a hornet’s nest of resentment. Darren must solve the crimes – and save himself in the process – before Lark’s long-simmering racial fault lines erupt.
‘A winning literary thriller’ – MAIL ON SUNDAY
‘America’s most interesting crime writer’ – DAILY TELEGRAPH
About the author
Attica Locke is the author of Heaven, My Home, a Waterstones Thriller of the Month, Bluebird, Bluebird which won the CWA Steel Dagger and an Edgar Award; Pleasantville, which won the 2016 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and was longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction; Black Water Rising, which was nominated for an Edgar Award and shortlisted for the Orange Prize; and The Cutting Season, a national bestseller and winner of the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Attica Locke has worked on the adaptation of Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere and Ava Du Vernay’s Netflix series about the Central Park Five, When They See Us. A native of Houston, Texas, Attica lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband and daughter.