Review: Heaven, My Home

Heaven, My Home by Attica Locke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

HEAVEN, MY HOME is the second in Attica Locke’s Highway 59 series, the sequel to BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD continues the story of Texas Ranger Darren Mathews. Still tortured by the events in the first novel, and dealing with his strained relationships with his wife and his manipulating, blackmailing mother, Mathews investigates the disappearance of a 9-year old boy. The boy, the son of a white supremacist, has gone missing on Caddo Lake near the town of Jefferson but his family, especially his wealthy grandmother, seem more concerned with the land owned by an old, black man, quickly a suspect in the boy’s presumed death, than in the fate of young Levi King. Darren is conflicted too, protective towards the accused Leroy Page, about whether finding the boy will lead to another extremist in later life, about whether he can exploit the situation to implicate the boy’s jailed father in the murder from the first book in which Darren himself is implicated.

The story is full of racial tension and Attica Locke perfectly captures how the election of Donald Trump has made the Aryan Brotherhood more confident and how the ‘there are bad people on all sides’ rhetoric has impacted society, demonstrated in the FBI’s desire to portray the boy’s disappearance as a ‘hate crime’ against white people, conveniently ignoring the hatred of black, and native American, people openly displayed by the boy’s stepfather and his hangers-on. But the author is not afraid to show Darren Mathews’ own flaws and prejudices and this makes the story more authentic, the characters more fully rounded.

Like the blues music that the book is steeped in, there is a lot of pain and not a lot of humour in the story but, like the blues, it is cathartic and real - HEAVEN, MY HOME really should come with a soundtrack - and the music is reflected in the lyrical prose -

“Her voice was husky, like aged molasses that had crystallized and developed sharp edges.”

“Cypress trees, their trunks skirted so that they appeared like the shy dancers at a church social, leaving enough space for God between them...”

It’s gorgeous, rhythmic writing and, thankfully, the ending would suggest that there is more of Darren’s story to come.

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