Tag: Texas Ranger Darren Mathews

Review 2760: Guide Me Home

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

I believe I read somewhere that this book is to be the last of the Highway 59 series. Since it wraps up some things that have been threads in all three books, that makes sense.

The protagonist of these books is Black Texas Ranger Darren Matthews, and this one doesn’t start out very well for him. Although he intends to ask his girlfriend Randie to marry him, he is late getting home to meet her because of his drinking the night before. For several years, he’s had a threat hanging over him for obstruction of justice in a murder case. The fact is, he did worse than that, framing a hardened member of the Aryan Brotherhood to save an old family retainer. What with the disbanding of his unit fighting hate crimes and the general tenor of the Trump administration, Darren is tired, so he has just retired despite the arguments of his boss.

When he arrives home, more trouble awaits. Randie is there, but so is his mother, from whom he has long been estranged and whose actions in stealing the murder weapon from him and turning it into the police have created the situation with the D. A. that Darren is in. She has come, she says, to try to get him to look into the disappearance of a student at Stephen F. Austin University, where she works cleaning a sorority.

Darren has a big fight with his mother and after she leaves, another one with Randie when she tries to get him to see his mother’s point of view on the key issue—what has always been presented to him as her abandonment of him as a child. Randie then leaves.

Of course, he drinks again, but when he sobers up, he decides to look at the disappearance of the girl. There is no report of anyone missing, but his mother tells him she is the only Black girl in the sorority—that she was told the girl left the sorority, but she found all her things in the trash, including her cell phone.

Darren finds out the girl’s name is Sara Fuller. His reception at the sorority is hostile, with the two girls he talks to making it clear they didn’t like Sara but insisting she moved out. When Darren goes to talk to her parents, he finds they live in an odd community named Thornhill that is for workers in the Thornhill plant. The Thornhill guards are also hostile, and Sara’s parents insist she is at school. When Darren returns home, though, he finds that a boy has followed him home—a friend of Sara’s named Rey who has found a bloody shirt in the forest where he and Sara hang out.

Darren has a lot of things going on, including heat from the Texas Rangers because a couple of times he has reflexively identified himself as one.

I have liked the atmosphere and settings in these books and the strong attachment Darren has to the area. I haven’t really liked the ongoing plot of the murder gun or the cliché of the drinking. Still, the mysteries themselves are quite good ones, so overall, I’ve enjoyed the series.

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Review 2679: Heaven, My Home

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

I’m really liking the Highway 59 series by Attica Locke. I think the mysteries are fully imagined, and black Texas Ranger Darren Mathews is interesting and appealing. I have a few problems with some ongoing issues, but I’ll talk about them later.

Nine-year-old Levi King has gone missing, and his father Bill King, a racist and murderer, has written from prison asking for help finding him. Darren’s boss needs him to help out, as there is hope that King can offer insight on other cases.

Levi lives with his mother Marnie, sister, and Aryan Brotherhood wannabe Gil Thomason, Marnie’s boyfriend, in Hopetown on the edge of Caddo Lake, a huge lake that used to be a major transportation route down to Louisiana. Hopetown is barely a crossroads, a trailer park full of racist trailer trash, and closer to the lake, the much nicer homes of the original black and indigenous settlers.

The reactions of some of the people involved to the disappearance are strange. Levi’s mother and sister are clearly upset, but no one else, including Levi’s wealthy grandmother, Rosemary King, seems to be worried. Darren hears that Levi had been harassing the black and Caddo indigenous population, and when he visits Leroy Page, he learns the old black man owns all of the property and hasn’t tossed out the trailer park residents because the lease with Marnie’s recently deceased father, Leroy’s friend, is not up for a year. Leroy isn’t very cooperative, but Darren is disturbed to learn from his best friend Greg, a federal agent, that Leroy Page’s harassment by Levi is being turned around as a motive for murder, especially because Leroy was the last to see Levi. In fact, the Feds want to show the new Trump administration that they are as ready to prosecute black people as white, so they are pushing hard even though there is no proof that Levi is dead.

Darren thinks there is something else going on here, but he has several personal problems in addition to hostility from the local authorities and the federal goals.

The only things I don’t like about this series are the ongoing plot that has Darren suppressing evidence to protect an old family friend and his drinking, which is such a cliché. He is on the wagon and repairing his marriage at the beginning of the novel, but things go south pretty fast (although his wife’s professional goals for him do not match his own, so I don’t prophecy success at that).

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Review 2588: Bluebird, Bluebird

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

Black Texas Ranger Darren Mathews is on suspension after he went to the aid of Rutherford McMillan, a man who has worked for his family for years. He is also having trouble with his wife, Lisa, who wants him to return to law school. Then a friend, Greg Heglund, an FBI agent in Houston, asks Darren to look unofficially at a situation in Lark in East Texas. There, the body of a Black man, an outsider, was found in the bayou and later the body of a White woman, a local, was also found there. Usually in that part of the country it’s the other way around, plus Lark hasn’t had a murder for years.

An interest for Darren is the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, and he finds in tiny Lark a major presence. The only two businesses in town are Geneva Sweet’s café with mostly Black patrons and an icehouse up the road packed with members of the ABT. When he arrives at Geneva Sweet’s Sweets, he finds the locals nervous and unwelcoming. Missy Dale’s body was found right behind the café. At Jeff’s Juice House, just up the road, where Missy was a waitress, he finds the all-White clientele belligerent and violent.

Then Rainie Wright arrives. She’s the widow of Michael Wright, the first victim, and she is distraught. She worries Darren, because she is from Chicago and has no idea how to behave in the rural South (and no, this novel is not set in the past).

A person Darren finds of interest is Wally Jefferson, a rich White man whose mansion is right across the highway from Geneva’s café and who treats her and the café with a proprietorial air. But Geneva is prone to telling him to get out of her place.

Darren is inclined to suspect Missy’s husband of the murders, since Missy was seen talking to Michael at the icehouse. But that doesn’t quite satisfy him. There are connections here that he doesn’t understand.

I’ve been looking around for a new mystery series to follow, and this novel by Locke has me wanting to look for more. I am familiar with East Texas, and she has the atmosphere down. There is plenty of action and some suspense in this novel. I have to admit that my suspicions fell on a culprit pretty quickly, and I sensed that the story would have something to do with an earlier crime, which it did. But I certainly had some surprises coming. The only think I didn’t like was the cliché of the cop who drinks too much. Bluebird, Bluebird is listed as the first of Locke’s Highway 59 series, so I’m not sure if the others feature the same protagonist or just the locale or both. I have driven on that highway so many times!

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