Heaven, My Home is Attica Locke's fifth novel, and the second starring Texas Ranger Darren Mathews (Bluebird Bluebird). In the time between Trump's election and his inauguration, Darren has been assigned to look into the case of a missing child. In northeast Texas's Hopetown, on Caddo Lake, Darren's mission is not exactly to find the child, but to extract a confession--truthful or not--from a member of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas (ABT) for the murder of another ABT member. Darren's life is a mess: he's only just patched things up with his wife, and his mother is low-key blackmailing him in regards to the same murder.
He's conflicted in several ways. A nine-year-old boy is missing, and Darren should save him, but this is a nine-year-old racist-in-training, and that training is going well so far. Darren knows justice should be absolute and blind, but the ABT man he's being asked to frame was acquitted of another murder--of a black man--that he certainly did commit. Among the recurring questions of this novel: How far should forgiveness stretch?
Heaven, My Home is a rich, complex puzzle, with layers of characters: Darren's not-very-maternal mother, the two uncles who raised him (a law professor and a Ranger, respectively), his lawyer wife, the Rangers he associates with and those he doesn't, his white FBI buddy who prosecutes a black man for a hate crime. And, of course, the ABT and ABT hangers-on squatting in Hopetown, historically a freedmen's community and the last enclave of a small band of Caddo Indians. This sounds complicated, and it is, but 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. This is a world where white families still remember which black families "stole" themselves away. Spouses cheat; close relatives feud; Darren is a deeply good man, unsure of how to right all of history's wrongs.
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. Locke's expression of very real and contemporary anxieties is nearly painfully spot-on. Her East Texas is redolent of fried hushpuppies and catfish. For Darren, "it was not his East Texas. It was zydeco where he wanted blues. It was boudin where he wanted hot links." It is a richly expressed place, filled with racial tensions and a fear of Trump's coming regime.
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. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia
Shelf Talker: This scintillating murder mystery, set in Trump-era East Texas, with a black main cast and racial concerns, is gripping, gorgeously written and relevant.