Bluebird, Bluebird - Attica Locke

Winner of the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger 2018 and shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger.

A powerful thriller about the explosive intersection of love, race, and justice from a writer and producer of the Emmy winning Fox TV/Channel 4 show Empire.

Southern fables usually go the other way around.

A white woman is killed or harmed in some way, real or imagined, and then, like the moon follows the sun, a black man ends up dead. But when it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules - a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger working the backwoods towns of Highway 59, knows all too well.

Deeply ambivalent about his home state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home. So when allegiance to his roots puts his job in jeopardy, he is drawn to a case in the small town of Lark, where two dead bodies washed up in the bayou. First a black lawyer from Chicago and then, three days later, a local white woman, and it's stirred up a hornet's nest of resentment.

Darren must solve the crimes - and save himself in the process - before Lark's long-simmering racial fault lines erupt.

'In Bluebird, Bluebird Attica Locke had both mastered the thriller and exceeded it. Ranger Darren Mathews is tough, honor-bound, and profoundly alive in corrupt world. I loved everything about this book.' - Anne Patchett