Review

Guide Me Home
by Attica Locke
Mulholland Books,
US/Viper, UK, 2024

Guide Me Home is the third in the series of Highway 59 crime novels by Attica Locke, which began with Bluebird, Bluebird, followed by Heaven, My Home. I would recommend beginning with the first if you are new to her as having some background helps. Our protagonist is Darren Matthews, a Black Texas Ranger (his uncle had been the first Black Ranger), who has had to tangle with the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. Threads of the first two novels are picked up in   Guide Me Home, which does not involve the ABT though links to some past dealings remain.

In this latest, a local Black girl, Sera Fuller, goes missing. She had been attending a local university where she'd been a member of a posh white sorority. A young Hispanic friend, Rey, about to leave town due to his own dire circumstances, stops by a mountain top retreat where he and Sara used to hang out. There he finds a bloody shirt of Sera's. But the search really kicks off when Darren's mother, Bell, a drunk from whom he's long been estranged, reports the missing girl to Darren. Bell, who has now cleaned up her act, works as a cleaner at the sorority house where Sera lived and says she's disappeared. What's more, Bell found her belongings thrown in the trash. Both Bell and Darren's girlfriend, Randie, encourage him to take the case. What they don't know is that Darren has just turned in his badge to the Texas Rangers because "he had a hard time coloring inside the lines of white folks' ideas of justice for people like them." The timeline is Trump's first presidency, which has not helped his "ideas of justice."

But they convince him, so as an ordinary citizen, he begins looking into the case. He still hates his mother, with whom he's had a volatile history, summarized here, but clearly laid out in the previous novels. Suspicion points in two directions:  the sorority itself and to the peculiar, gated work/residence community, Thornhill, where Sera's family lives, which appears shrouded in mystery.

All is made harder as Darren is being pursued by the local DA, now running for a congressional seat, who has "hitched his campaign rhetoric to the winds of MAGA terror over antifa and the BLM movement, somehow tying Darren to both, openly painting him as a radical who had infiltrated Texas law enforcement and taken the law into his own hands by interfering in a homicide investigation." There is truth as regards the interference, but can it be proved?
After a drunken blowout with his girlfriend—yes, Darren finds refuge in Jim Beam—he is left on his own, with no help coming from the missing girls' parents, especially the father, a MAGA supporter himself.

Locke is a superb crime novelist. Here she ties up all the loose ends from the previous two novels, weaving together several plotlines which keep the reader riveted to the page. As a backdrop, she nails the insidiousness of Trump's presidency while throwing up blurred lines to any easy Us versus Them. But the damage of the hate and anger unleashed is clear. Reading this after Trump was elected yet again this year made it all the more poignant. But I found it cathartic as well. Darren and Bell, flawed as they are, stand up for justice, and we root for them. It is an excellent book to help one get through our current times. And if you’re new to Locke, you have three compelling novels to help sustain you.  J.A.