Why a Booktrail?
A black man and a white woman have been found dead in the same bayou just days apart.
A black man and a white woman have been found dead in the same bayou just days apart.
Darren Mathews is a Texas Ranger but he has as much of a backstory as any of the people he hunts down and captures. He escaped the lone star state due to racial problems and family tensions, but duty has brought him back. Back to the small town of Lark, where two deaths, two murders of a white woman and black man risk igniting a tinder box of racial tensions and resentment.
Darren takes it upon himself to get to the heart of the problem and the heart, broken or not, of his home town he left behind.
A small town in the middle of nowhere it would seem. Certainly all avenues in the investigation lead to nowhere – apart from the bayou where the bodies are found.
A town located on broken ground, two sides of a racial ravine and a crevice so deep, once you fall down it, it’s almost impossible to get out. Darren goes back to this place as it’s his town, it;s where he knows, but a black Texan Ranger is still an outsider even if he’s local or not.
The novel raises interesting issues, makes you think, allows you inside the bubbling tensions of a small Texan town. The landscape is barren and cold, dry and isolated, taunt with heated tensions and dry emotions. The characters are very interesting – Erza Brook and Geneva Sweet to name but two. And the ghosts of the Jim Crow laws – Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States.
Author/Guide: Attica Locke Destination: “Lark” Texas
Back to Results