Awards
Winner of the 2018 Edgar Award for Best Novel
Synopses & Reviews
A powerful thriller about the explosive intersection of love, race, and justice from a writer and producer of the Emmy winning Fox TV show Empire.
East Texas: it's an unforgiving landscape where justice for all can be hard to come by-a fact that Darren Matthews, an African-American Texas Ranger knows all too well. Darren made it out alive, but returned to the only place he'll ever call home to fight those who forced him to flee. When the struggle lands him in hot water, Darren takes a trip along Highway 59 to Lark, where two murders-an African-American lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman-have stirred up a hornet's nest of resentment. Darren must solve the crimes before Lark's long simmering racial fault lines erupt. A rural noir suffused with the music of Texas, BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD, is an exhilarating, timely novel about the collision of race and justice in America.
Review
"Gripping, suspenseful and gut-wrenching . . . I've never bought the notion of the Great American Novel. I think when literary historians look back, they'll realize this time had many, but if Attica Locke's Bluebird Bluebird isn't on the list, I'm coming back to haunt them. . . . This is a layered portrait of a black man confronting his own racial ambivalence and ambition told with a pointed and poignant bluesy lyricism. . . . Locke's novel is America 'telling on itself.' Listen up." Carole Barrowman, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Review
"A quick course in plotting and nimble characterizations rooted in a vividly evoked setting." Nicole Lamy, New York Times Book Review
Review
"Darren must deal with his conflicting loyalties to his family and to Texas as well as his identity as a black man as he struggles for justice in this tale of racism, hatred, and surprisingly love. Agent: Richard Abate 3 Arts Entertainment. (Sept.) " Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Attica Locke is the author of 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 Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. She was a writer and producer on the Fox drama Empire. A native of Houston, Texas, Attica lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband and daughter.