Heaven, My Home (A Highway 59 Novel, 2)

Product Description

In this “captivating” crime novel (People), Texas Ranger Darren Mathews is on the hunt for a missing child — but it’s the boy’s family of white supremacists who are his real target.

9-year-old Levi King knew he should have left for home sooner; now he’s alone in the darkness of vast Caddo Lake, in a boat whose motor just died. A sudden noise distracts him – and all goes dark.

Darren Mathews is trying to emerge from another kind of darkness; after the events of his previous investigation, his marriage is in a precarious state of re-building, and his career and reputation lie in the hands of his mother, who’s never exactly had his best interests at heart. Now she holds the key to his freedom, and she’s not above a little maternal blackmail to press her advantage.

An unlikely possibility of rescue arrives in the form of a case down Highway 59, in a small lakeside town where the local economy thrives on nostalgia for ante-bellum Texas – and some of the era’s racial attitudes still thrive as well. Levi’s disappearance has links to Darren’s last case, and to a wealthy businesswoman, the boy’s grandmother, who seems more concerned about the fate of her business than that of her grandson.

Darren has to battle centuries-old suspicions and prejudices, as well as threats that have been reignited in the current political climate, as he races to find the boy, and to save himself.

A Best Book of the Year New York Times

Houston Chronicle

NPR

Wall Street Journal

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

Book Page

Financial Times

Kirkus

SheReads

Sunday Times

LitHub

Guardian

Book Riot

South Florida Sun Sentinel

Longlisted for the Orwell Political Fiction Book Prize

Review

“Timely and evocative.”
―
NPR “Fresh Air”

“Captivating.”
―
People

“Bewitching story and luscious language . . . . The story has legs, the characters have character, and the dialogue has a wonderful regional tang. But it’s Locke’s descriptive language that gets me.”
―
New York Times

“Atmospheric . . . Ms. Locke, a canny storyteller, ties up enough strands to satisfy readers, while leaving enough loose ends to make us eager for Ranger Mathews’s next adventure in the Lone Star State.”
―
Tom Nolan,
Wall Street Journal

“Locke’s beautifully written crime fiction (which also includes “Pleasantville,” “Black Water Rising,” and “The Cutting Season”) have a remarkable immediacy–you breathe with the characters and walk in their paths.”
―
Seattle Times

“Pulse-pounding.”
―
Chicago Tribune

“Locke skillfully packs
Heaven, My Home with realistic and, at times, uncomfortable situations as she depicts complicated characters. In Darren, Locke has fearlessly shaped a character that constantly walks a tightrope of being a good man with a quest for justice and being an extremely flawed person. . . . [Locke] once again excels in her superior storytelling.”―
Oline Cogdill,
Associated Press

“With her usual aplomb, Locke tackles history and its all-too-real emotional fallout in this splendid follow-up.”
―
Boston Globe

“[Locke] has proved that there’s demand for stories about black characters. . . . Her books, categorized as mystery or crime, are also unabashedly about black experiences, examining the legacy of black history in the context of modern politics and culture. The crime she really concerns herself with is an existential one: the legacy of America’s original sin. The protagonists in her novels are mostly black men, and she writes with the authenticity of a lived experience.”
―
Madhulika Sikka,
Washington Post

“Riveting.”
―
Philadelphia Inquirer

About the Author

ATTICA LOCKE is the author of the 2018 Edgar Award winner
Bluebird, Bluebird; Pleasantville, which won the 2016 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and was long-listed for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction;
Black Water Rising, which was nominated for an Edgar Award; and
The Cutting Season, a national bestseller and winner of the Ernest J. Gaine