Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke

With its strong sense of place and dynamic dialogues Bluebird, Bluebird makes for a solid Southern Noir, one that will definitely appeal to fans of crime authors such as Walter Mosley, Dennis Lehane, and S.A. Cosby. Bluebird, Bluebird follows Darren Mathews, a Black Texas Ranger. After helping out a friend in need Darren’s job as a Ranger is now on the line. He and his wife are on a break as she is tired of his devotion to the Rangers and believes that he should instead become a lawyer. Darren is fully aware of the faults within his department—from racial profiling to brutality and corruption—he has a strong sense of justice and seems determined to make a change. A friend of his convinces him to look into two recent murders in Lark, a rural and predominantly white small town. In less than a week, two bodies washed up in the bayou: first, a Black lawyer from Chicago, and then a 20-year-old local white woman.
Darren’s presence in Lark causes quite a stir as Lark’s law enforcement and its residents aren’t keen on ‘outsiders’, especially those who ask too many questions and seem determined to uncover long-buried secrets. Darren knows that this was a racially motivated murder and is determined to solve the case, even at the cost of his own safety.

Bluebird, Bluebird was an engrossing and deeply atmospheric whodunnit. It has some hard-boiled elements to it, snappy dialogues, and presents its readers with an incisive examination of race, justice, and belonging in a Southern state whose past and present are still marred by racial injustices. The author capture Darren’s inner conflict with clarity and empathy: on the one hand he loves Texas, on the other, he knows far too well how dangerous a place it is (over the course of the narrative Darren comes face to face with members of the Aryan Brotherhood). His character did fall a bit too neatly in the gruff noir detective who has a drinking problem and despite his not always amenable demeanour or actions, his heart is in the right place. The wife of the murdered lawyer also has a role in the story, that of an ingenue from the Big City who spends most of the time crying (falling into Darren’s manly arms) or screaming during gun shootings. To be perfectly honest, I could have done without her. Darren’s poor wife is a mere blip in the story, she gets two or three mentions but otherwise, her character is utterly irrelevant.
Locke’s storytelling is great even if she does employ the dreaded “[He] let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding” which earns her a minus (i have come to loathe this particular phrase). But, thankfully, for the most part, her writing is definitely compelling. The descriptions about the bayou, the long seemingly deserted roads, and other Southern landscapes are incredibly vivid. The dialogues too, as I mentioned already, have this ping-pong quality that makes the book hard to put down.
While Bluebird, Bluebird didn’t quite hit me the way Blacktop Wasteland did (if you haven’t read that novel and you are a fan of southern noir novels, do yourself a favour, read it) I still enjoyed reading it and I will definitely be checking out its sequel.

my rating: ★★★¼

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