Reviewed by Craig Sisterson
Texas Ranger Darren Mathews has handed in his badge. A choice made three years before, which served justice if not the law, means that he may now stand trial. And his mother - an intermittent and destructive force in his life - is the cause of his fall from grace.
And yet it is his mother's reappearance that may also be his salvation. A black girl at an all-white sorority at a nearby college is missing, her belongings tossed in a dumpster. Her sorority sisters, the college police, even the girl's own family, deny that she has disappeared, but Sera Fuller is nowhere to be found. A bloodstained shirt discovered in a woodland clearing may be the last trace of her. And Darren's mother wants her son to work the case.
Disillusioned by an America forever changed by the presidency of Donald Trump, Darren reluctantly agrees. Yet as he sets out to find a girl whose family don't want her found, it is his own family's history that may be brought painfully into the light. And a reckoning with his past may finally show Darren the future he can build.
For me, Texas-born Attica Locke's superb 2017 thriller Bluebird, Bluebird, the first in her series starring black Texas Ranger Darren Mathews, may be one of the best novels of the past decade, with its rich storytelling and incisive observations about dangerous rhetoric emboldening a white supremacist underbelly desperately clinging on in America.
Five years after its excellent sequel, Heaven My Home, we now have a fitting finale to an outstanding ‘Highway 59’ trilogy. With the legal consequences of past choices still hanging over him like a sword of Damocles, a bourbon-soaked Mathews hands in his badge. Then his mother, who’s played a key role in his many troubles, reappears. Apparently sober, wanting his help to find what’s happened to a black girl missing from the all-white sorority where Darren’s mother now works.
Disillusioned by how law and justice are being twisted in Trump’s America, Mathews reluctantly agrees, only to uncover a snake’s den of deceit, and discover far more about his own family history.
Locke once again soaks readers in the East Texas setting, and the humanity and frustrations of good people trying to live and operate in an unjust world. Mathews is confronted not only by the mystery of a missing girl who everyone – even her family – seems to insist is okay, but the mystery of his mother, and his accepted narrative of his own past.
Locke takes readers on an emotional, character-centric ride through a slice of modern America, where the prejudices and divisions of the past are stirred up and shaken out in various ways in the present.
While it's a little disappointing Locke has said that Guide Me Home will be the final Darren Mathews tale, for the foreseeable future at least - after originally planning a longer running series - overall it is an excellent read and a fitting finale to a terrific trilogy that captures, all to scarily, some of the simmering realities of a nation changed, or perhaps just revealed, by Trump's 'MAGA' inciting runs for President.
Top shelf.
Craig Sisterson is a lawyer turned writer, editor, podcast host, awards judge, and event chair. He's the founder of the Ngaio Marsh Awards, co-founder of Rotorua Noir, author of Macavity and HRF Keating Award-shortlisted non-fiction work SOUTHERN CROSS CRIME, editor of the DARK DEEDS DOWN UNDER anthology series, and writes about books for magazines and newspapers in several countries.
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