STRANGE DARK TIMES FROM NOT LONG AGO: ATTICA LOCKE'S GUIDE ME HOME

Attica Locke's Highway 59 series gives us a look at a Texas we rarely see. African American Texas Ranger Darren Matthews has taken us through his culture that has had a huge influence on the state it is often at odds with. History clashes with current events and justice becomes a slippery thing to enact. All of these ideas and others come to a head in the latest, Guide Me Home.

Set in 2019, Matthews is both in turmoil and at peace. An ambitious, race baiting state's attorney sees a way to make a name for himself and presses hard to get an indictment against him for a situation that occurred in the first book, Bluebird, Bluebird. He has resigned from The Rangers and is working on a house he plans to share with his love as he waits for his fate. Fate comes at him from a different angle in the form of Bell, his mother who put him in this uncomfortable position.

Bell swears she was trying to help him, but he believes little of it since she caused more harm than good in his life. She has also come to ask him to look into the disappearance of Sarah Heller, the only black girl of a sorority at Stephen F. Austin University. Bell cleaned the sorority house and feels she is the only one who cares. As Darren begrudgingly goes to Nacogdoches to look into it he agrees. Both the college and law enforcement have done little and even her parents appear unconcerned.

Bell also brings challenges in Matthews' personal life when she tells him about his father's connection to The Vietnam War that contradicts what he was told by the two uncles who raised him. He wonders about his identity and the relationship to the men in his family. In Locke's Texas, the past lurks to pounce on those in the present.

As he dives in to the mystery, we get an examination of what the state and country have gone through woven throughout. Darren uses his law enforcement contacts, many conflicted by their service under the Trump administration. His search and research leads to two businesses with a long history, connected to two families with a lot of skeletons.

Locke's story has a way of viewing both the forest and the trees. She captures the big picture of our recent era, connecting them to moments and details, where the reality moved into the surreal through politics that opened a dangerous Pandora's box. Racists wear Tommy Bahama in the daytime instead of hiding under white hoods at night. This perfectly described when Matthews thinks about the Charlottesville march. He even encounters a black MAGA supporter.

Like Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlings series, Highway 59 gives us a look at a subculture built by a minority cast aside by the mainstream one. Locke presents it as one where that mainstream one has turned from at least a tolerance back to a need to obliterate it. It has all unleashed a society where villains can be presented as heroes to some. Somne can even be voted into office.