Erica Ciccarone

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Texas Ranger Darren Mathews wants out of his genre.

Or that’s what the husband of Attica Locke, author of the Highway 59 mystery trilogy, said when he finished reading Guide Me Home, Locke’s exceptional final volume in the series. 

“It’s as if he’s kind of done with the cops and robbers of it all,” Locke says of Darren, the flawed lawman who first entranced readers in 2017’s Edgar Award-winning Bluebird, Bluebird. There, Darren slipped into seedy Aryan Brotherhood bars to help a grieving wife solve her husband’s murder. His uncle William was the first Black Texas Ranger, and Darren followed in his footsteps, wearing his silver star with pride. 2019’s Heaven, My Home saw him investigating the disappearance of a white supremacist’s son, as Darren’s marriage unraveled and his drinking got worse. Throughout both books, Frank Vaughn, a white district attorney with political ambitions, tries to expose Darren for lying to secure the freedom of an elderly Black man, who was accused of a crime he didn’t commit.

Guide Me Home is set three years after Heaven, My Home. Vaughn is still building his case, and a depressed, soul-weary Darren decides to take an early retirement from law enforcement. The very day he turns in his badge, his troublemaking mother, Bell, shows up uninvited at his family home. Bell blackmailed Darren in Heaven, and she is the key witness in Vaughn’s case. But she brings with her something Darren cannot resist: the kernel of a case. Sera Fuller, a Black college student, has gone missing, and the members of the all-white sorority she joined know more than they’ll admit.

Highway 59 snakes from the northeastern corner of Texas down through Houston, Locke’s hometown, and sweeps southwest to the border. “We would drive up and down Highway 59 all the time to go visit grandparents and relatives,” Locke tells BookPage from her home in Los Angeles. “And those car rides were my early kind of daydreaming out the window, thinking about stories, just making stuff up in my head.”

“I worry that readers would be like, ‘Wait a second. What are you doing here?’ . . . It has a different kind of energy about it.”

Locke often shifts from project to project, writing novels (Pleasantville, The Cutting Season) and for TV (Empire, When They See Us). The years she spent writing Guide Me Home were catastrophic: COVID-19, the murder of George Floyd and the 2023 Writers Guild strike all weighed heavily on Locke’s mind as she sent her hero hurtling toward ruin. She asks readers to grope around in the dark with Darren as he confronts truly painful truths, with the central mystery at times taking a backseat to his internal conflict and family drama. 

“Darren is also just my whole heart,” Locke says. “And I worry that readers would be like, ‘Wait a second. What are you doing here? He’s not doing all the shoot ’em up, bang, bang, tough guy stuff. Where is all that?’ . . . It has a different kind of energy about it.”

And yet, Locke’s take on the missing girl trope is a standout in a genre that sheds girls like skin cells. While Sera is away at a nearby college, her family lives in an insular gated community called Thornhill, where families work in chicken and pork processing factories on-site in exchange for their cookie-cutter houses, K-12 schools and top-notch health care. As is usually the case, the utopian concept is, in practice, anything but. Rather, it’s a modern sharecropping system that keeps workers from ever accumulating wealth, all while they breathe acrid air from factories that might just be making people sick. Sera’s father, a Black Trump supporter named Joseph, has become a puppet for the rich white people who own Thornhill, ready and willing to be the Black face of the “movement” for “compassionate capitalism.” He is clearly lying when he denies that Sera has disappeared from her college campus: Her belongings are found in the trash, including her medication for sickle cell anemia. 

Thornhill only truly clicked one day as Locke walked her dog: “I was thinking about two things that became really clear to people during COVID. We are not taking care of each other in terms of health care. It’s just really fucking difficult to be alive and have health care in this country. And capitalism does not give a shit about workers. . . . I’m realizing the ways in which COVID laid bare these two facts, and somehow they found their way into the soul and the plot of the book.”

Read our starred review of ‘Guide Me Home’ by Attica Locke.

The other valve in the dark heart of Guide Me Home is the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump and the escalating danger and sense of alienation it caused for Black Americans. Locke writes that Darren is “profoundly, unimaginatively sad in this world,” in the “fever dream that had been the years since Donald Trump was elected. Years that had laid bare the fragility of democracy.”

“This book series inadvertently became a treatise on the Trump era in a way that had not been intended,” Locke says. “I think in the series, Texas is often a stand­-in for America. There’s a reason there’s that saying, ‘As Texas goes, so goes the nation’ . . . there is a sense that Darren’s ambivalent feelings about loving Texas are, I think, a mirror for a lot of people who have ambivalent feelings about how do we love our country through its worst impulses.” 

Darren can’t imagine living anywhere else, even as the state constantly disappoints him. It disappoints Locke, too. “When I watch it from afar, it frequently breaks my heart to think of the Greg Abbotts of the [state] being what the rest of the world thinks Texas is,” she says, “when I know it to be, on the ground, infinitely more complex and infinitely less hateful. Now, I say that knowing full well that there are wild pockets of hateful people everywhere, and there are a lot of hateful people in Texas. But there are, I would argue, to some degree, more that aren’t.” 

It’s not lost on Locke, or on Darren, that being a Black cop is complicated. As the series progresses, Darren is at odds with two competing ideologies handed down by the uncles who raised him, Texas Ranger William and defense attorney Clayton: Must Black people be protected by the law, or from the law? Locke lays this out in chapter one: “Sure, it was a sentiment among Black cops these days that ‘Black Lives Matter’ meant a gun and the law had their purpose—safeguarding Black folks in every corner of American life. But Darren felt resentful of the idea that Black cops somehow bore the sole responsibility for this. Surely it was someone else’s turn to do the work of righting the country’s racial wrongs, case by trauma-inducing case.” 

“It frequently breaks my heart to think of the Greg Abbotts of the [state] being what the rest of the world thinks Texas is.”

Locke echoes this yearning: “There is a limit to what Black and brown folks can do alone to right some racial wrongs. And we kind of need help. And the hope is always that there will be folks who will consider that, just like I didn’t ask for the history on my back of slavery . . . You [meaning this white interviewer] also didn’t ask for all the privileges. You didn’t ask for it, but it’s real. So what do you do with it?”

All of this comes to bear on Darren’s psyche and heart. His alcoholism, present but not destructive in the first two books, is now raging. And his upbringing, developed marvelously in Bluebird and Heaven, comes into question. As an infant, Bell relinquished him to his uncles, and she’s breezed in and out of his life ever since, growing more manipulative and nasty with each episode. Her blackmailing him was the last straw. Darren’s trauma over her abandonment was so severe that he never asked her what happened, but took his well-meaning uncles’ version of the story as the truth. As he investigates Sera’s disappearance and Thornhill’s suspicious origins, he uncovers questions that only Bell can answer. Locke, whose daughter starts college this fall, hopes Guide Me Home will “flip how children see their parents.” The book’s dedication—“For every mother whose child knows only half the story”—conveys this hope, and Bell’s as well. Darren can only find home once he solves one final mystery, that of his own origins. 

The Highway 59 series closes during the 2019 holiday season. In a few months, a global pandemic will take over the world. Darren has no idea what’s coming, but, thanks to Locke’s brilliant storytelling, readers will have faith that he’ll be all right.

Photo of Attica Locke by Victoria Will.

In the finale of Attica Locke's beloved Highway 59 mystery series, her hero turns in his badge.
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The finale of Attica Locke’s beloved Highway 59 series starts with a shocker: Darren Mathews, the deeply moral, and deeply complicated, Black Texas Ranger hell-bent on destroying the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, turns in his badge. 

Darren is worn down. A wily district attorney has relentlessly pursued his prosecution for a lie Darren told to protect an elderly Black man. Worse, the 2016 election of Donald Trump as president has left Darren in a state of utter despair, with his alcoholism “shaking him from the inside out.” Even with a stable girlfriend (whose presence will make fans of the series cheer), Darren is hurtling toward a breakdown when an unexpected source tells him about a Black teenage girl who has gone missing from a bizarre, dystopian community called Thornhill. 

Darren Mathews wants out of his genre.

Both 2017’s Edgar Award-winning Bluebird, Bluebird and its follow-up, 2019’s Heaven, My Home, force Darren up against society’s worst humans. But his most needling nemesis is not the Aryan Brotherhood, corrupt lawmen or plain old everyday racists. It’s his manipulative mother, Bell, who abandoned him to his uncles in his infancy. Guide Me Home changes the story by making Bell the Dr. Watson to Darren’s Holmes. It’s an uneasy truce, and readers will sympathize with both characters in equal measure as they unravel the Thornhill mystery.

Many mystery fans are willing to overlook hackneyed turns of phrase and oft-used literary tropes for a walloping plot. But with Locke, there’s no need. Her language is precise, refreshing and often beautiful. The close third-person point of view immerses readers in Darren’s pain and confusion as the ghosts of his family emerge, including that of the father who died before Darren was born. 

Guide Me Home isn’t a standalone novel; readers new to the Ranger will want to start with Bluebird, Bluebird and proceed chronologically to appreciate the literary triumph that is the Highway 59 series.

Attica Locke’s language is precise, refreshing and often beautiful in Guide Me Home, the final installment in the literary triumph that is her Highway 59 mystery series.
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As many as 114,000 Americans who die each year are unclaimed by relatives. Their remains are buried without ceremony, often in mass graves, unwitnessed by anyone who knew them. What circumstances conspire for human beings to meet this end? And what do their deaths say about how we treat the living? Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans unearth some of their stories, unpacking questions both existential and practical in their groundbreaking The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels.

The authors spent eight years investigating the bureaucratic hurdles, legislative failings and social ruptures that contribute to 1,600 unclaimed people in Los Angeles each year. Los Angeles County law stipulates that only next-of-kin can claim remains, but 1 in 4 adult Americans report being estranged from close family members. When relatives can be located, the costs associated with claiming remains are often too steep for them to bear; other times, they have no interest in claiming at all. What’s more, “bureaucratic apathy” and a muddled system relies on three separate departments to investigate the unclaimed.

The Unclaimed follows the stories of four Angelenos who went unclaimed for very different reasons: a reclusive elderly woman whose few surviving family members refused to claim her; a middle-aged woman beloved by her church family who, by law, could not claim and bury her; a veteran who slipped through the cracks; and a quiet man whose assets granted him a funeral that no one attended. Prickett and Timmermans also portray the death investigators who try to locate relatives with varying degrees of success; these civil servants are frustrated and exhausted, their departments understaffed and under-resourced. And the portraits the authors paint of the two civil servants who inter the unclaimed at the Boyle Heights cemetery—the “potter’s field” of L.A.—are extremely moving. Relying on 231 interviews, direct observation of death investigations, extensive research into 600 deaths, attendance of dozens of funerals and cremations, and more, Prickett and Timmermans humanize the dead with aching specificity, granting these few the honor that so many others deserve.

“If you die and no one calls out for you, did your life have meaning?” the authors ask. As the subtitle of the book suggests, there is hope, because more and more people are answering that call. In 2017, a pastor began organizing a memorial service for the unclaimed that draws droves of witnesses; veterans congregate to send off their siblings in arms; a nonprofit buries unclaimed infants in a special cemetery. The writing in this last third of the book sometimes veers into sentimentality, naming conclusions that readers can recognize themselves. But on the whole, The Unclaimed is a gripping and compassionate account that leaves us with a feeling of social and personal responsibility for our kin, our community and ourselves.

Gripping and groundbreaking, The Unclaimed investigates the Americans who are abandoned in death and what they tell us about how we treat the living.
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Bob Dylan is an artist of many faces: poet, folk hero, rock genius, visual artist, writer, welder, songsmith, Nobel Prize winner. He is, perhaps, what we project onto him of ourselves and our world. Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine is a 605-page immaculately designed compendium that seemingly encompasses all possible sides of the legend. The book expands on the inaugural exhibits at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which opened in 2022 and houses the complete Dylan archives. If you can’t get to Tulsa, Mixing Up the Medicine is the next best thing.

If you are expecting beautiful photos, art and memorabilia, you’ll find those here. If you want to read personal correspondence from Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, Jack White and other luminaries, look no further. And if you’d like to attempt to decipher Dylan’s chicken-scratch handwriting, you have your work cut out for you. But what sets Mixing Up the Medicine apart from other books of its type is the writing. Authors, artists and musicians visited the Tusla archive and were asked to choose a single item that “enticed, beguiled, stirred, perplexed, or galvanized them,” and then write an essay about it.

Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo selects a painting of the first record that Dylan—as 15-year-old Robert Zimmerman—recorded, a breathless cascade of radio hits tracked in a music shop’s recording booth with two friends for $5. Ranaldo imagines that evening in the songwriter’s youth with aching specificity. Poet Gregory Pardlo uses a letter written to Dylan by Black Panther Party leader Huey P. Newton to explore Dylan’s relationship with Black activists and artists. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo chooses the Japanese album cover of Blood on the Tracks, lyrically riffing on “Tangled Up in Blue.” Author Tom Piazza takes inspiration from a typewritten draft of “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” to pen a short play about a self-serious scholar who seeks the input of an exhausted, half-mad Dylanologist. And there’s more.

In the epilogue, Douglas Brinkley writes, “Dylan is an experience more like a meteorite than a mummified artifact of scholarly pursuit.” Mixing Up the Medicine, with all its heft and weight, keeps the man in motion—dazzling, beguiling and multidimensional. For Dylan acolytes, the joy of this tome is in combing its pages for the people we once were—our own changing faces, and those we will become.

Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine keeps the legendary artist in motion—dazzling, beguiling and multidimensional.
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To read Jesmyn Ward is to be carried by her epic, transformative language to the dark heart of the American South and, once there, to be surprised by the stark beauty of the region’s people. Let Us Descend, the Mississippi author’s fourth novel, brings Ward’s intimate knowledge of place to the pre-Civil War South, where her captivating narrator, teenage girl Annis, is enslaved. A two-time National Book Award winner (2011’s Salvage the Bones and 2017’s Sing, Unburied, Sing), Ward writes in the traditions of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison—but this story is unmistakably her own.

The journey begins at a North Carolina rice plantation owned by the enslaver who fathered Annis through rape. In a shady clearing in the woods, Annis’ mother teaches her to fight, yet their relationship is one of intense tenderness. When the enslaver sells Annis’ mother, our heroine is left grief-wracked. Before long, she too is sold downriver on a harrowing march to the slave markets of New Orleans. In North Carolina, she eavesdropped on her white half-sisters’ lessons about Dante’s Divine Comedy. Now, Annis recognizes her own descent through the circles of hell.

Let Us Descend is infused with the supernatural. Spirits approach Annis on her journey, offering protection and oblivion. Astute and intuitive, Annis steels herself against temptation, grounding herself in memories of her mother. The theme of mothering extends to the care Annis offers to and receives from the girls and women around her, which allows the characters to maintain their dignity and assert their humanity. These interactions are a balm not only to Annis but also to the reader. Ward constantly reminds us that oppressed people retain “soft parts” that the evils of slavery can never truly touch.

Though Annis seldom speaks and her dialogue often consists of single, short sentences, her thoughts sing with Ward’s signature lyricism. Ward’s choices of first-person point of view and present tense anchor us in Annis’ imagination. The narrator pictures her mother’s eyes “shriveled to pale raisins”; the ropes that bind her are “abrasive as a cat’s tongue on my open wrists”; a dying man is “a tunneling worm, shifting the earth above him.” These vivid observations and poetic interpretations express her resistance against bondage, her abiding understanding of beauty and her will to survive.

We sometimes forget that the descent in Dante’s Divine Comedy is a journey toward God. Ward’s reimagining of slavery is the profound manifestation of that possibility.

We sometimes forget that the descent in Dante’s Divine Comedy is a journey toward God. Jesmyn Ward’s portrayal of slavery is the profound manifestation of that possibility.

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