This is the second book in the newer series by Attica Locke about a Texas Ranger in the contemporary who is working on a special task focused on the Aryan Brotherhood. The book has a central mystery to it about the missing son of an imprisoned Aryan Brotherhood member, along side the continuing fallout from the first book also involving the murder/death/self-defense against another member in our narrator is embroiled. You would be missing the quality of the first book by jumping to this second one, but there’s another support in this one to catch you up if you had to read this one first, like on an airplane or something.
This series is good and challenging in a number of ways. For one, Attica Locke is a very skilled writer. Her books don’t enjoy as high a rating on Goodreads as they should, I would wager, because they challenge racist norms and attacks systems of power, not just obvious racists. There’s plenty of prima facie racists spouting the “n-word” in this book, but there’s also an intelligent, legally-trained Black cop who understands the complexity of his role in a racist system, his existence as a Black man in Texas in particular, and the US in general, and his role in a wider community. Adding the layer as police, he has a kind of triple-consciousness. He’s a deeply flawed character, but compelling, and he’s a “corrupt” cop, in that he breaks the law, but not a corrupt cop, on the take. And this book challenges the genre tropes of the cop who breaks the law to do good, which often has someone like Vic Mackie or other cops planting evidence etc to get those criminals they KNOW are guilty. Here, we have a cop looking for ways to protect those the law bludgeons by using the law’s own limits against the law. There’s also some of the most cogent and concise understandings of why the 2016 election feels very different than previous ones. (I more or less contend that the legal and policy effects are not expressly worse than they’ve ever been, but this book talks about the nakedness of the cruelty and hatred that was brought along).
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Heaven-My-Home-Highway-59/dp/1788160827/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1572427331&sr=8-3)