[For this year’s
installment in my
annual Beach Reads
series, I wanted to focus on mystery authors and novels about which I’ve previously
blogged in this space. Leading up a new post and author on Friday, and then one
of my favorite crowd-sourced posts of the year—so add your Beach Read
suggestions in comments, please!]
On the wonderful
first two novels by a new favorite author.
Attica Locke’s debut novel, Black Water Rising (2009), was the best book I read in
2014. I shouldn’t have been surprised, as it was shared with me by my
favorite writer and book-recommender. But while I knew that meant it would
be a good read, I was expecting just that: an entertaining and well-done
mystery novel (which would
have been more than enough, to be clear). And Black Water Rising is a hell of a lot more than that—I’m not going
to spoil any of its particulars here, but will simply say that the book is not
only a great mystery and thriller, but also a multi-generational historical
novel (one with a lot to say about both the 1980s and the 1960s), a socially
realistic depiction of issues such as race, labor, and the rise of the oil
industry in Houston and the South, a potent and moving portrayal of family and
parenting, and a lot more besides. If you want to know the rest, you know what
LeVar Burton and his kid reviewers would tell you to do!
I just got
Locke’s second novel, The Cutting Season (2012), as a
holiday present, and I haven’t had a chance to finish it yet (too busy writing
and scheduling future blog posts before the new semester begins, natch).
[UPDATE: I subsequently finished Cutting
and it was just as fun and impressive as I predicted it would be.] But I can
tell you for sure that no matter how it ends, Cutting Season retains all those elements and adds the histories
and legacies of slavery for good measure; the novel reads like a combination of
Black Water Rising and David
Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident
(1981), one of my favorite American novels of all time. I would have said it
was impossible for Locke to improve upon Black
Water, but it seems clear to me that she has indeed taken a significant
step forward, engaging more broadly and deeply with American history and
identity without losing a bit of what makes her books so engaging and
compelling.
Locke’s third
novel, Pleasantville, is due out this coming April [UPDATE: I
subsequently read and loved Pleasantville
as well, and blogged
about it here], and is apparently a direct sequel to Black Water Rising, featuring its lawyer protagonist Jay Porter in
a mystery set fifteen years after the end of that prior book (slight but not
hugely significant spoilers for Black
Water at that link). I’m excited to see where Locke takes Jay this time,
and what she might be adding to her repertoire with this next book. But at this
point, I also have to agree with Dennis Lehane: “I’d probably read the phone
book if her name were on the spine.” When I find an author about whom I feel
that way, well, that’s one of the things I love best about reading and culture.
Last mysterious read
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Beach Read nominees, mysterious or otherwise, you’d share?
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