Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for gifting me an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Attica Locke is back with the final chapter in the tale of Darren Mathews, a Texas Ranger with occasionally questionable tactics but well-intentioned nonetheless. Desperate to find some sense of normalcy following a rough chain of events, he is hopeful to rebuild the relationship with his wife and move on from his past. He seems to be doing so when a familiar face drags him back into a potential missing persons case, and he finds himself once again navigating the dark underbelly of racial tensions in Texas.

Locke is such a powerful master of the Southern noir genre and she bends her story into this gritty, tense dialogue once again. We finally see the story end for Mathews here and any reader of the first two titles in this trilogy should find the ending satisfactory. I'm looking forward to future titles from Locke.

I loved the evocative writing, but I was most drawn in by the characters, flawed but trying their best to make a difference in a hostile world. The characters’ evolution over this trilogy was believable and satisfying. Darren, of course, is the star of the book, but I was just as interested in the supporting characters, especially his newly sober mother. This was a riveting and moving tale about seeking justice when the odds are stacked against you and when your country seems bent on destroying you.

In the third and final volume of the Highway 59 trilogy, the Black Texas ranger at the center of it is in trouble. He's being investigated for a crime which depends on evidence provided by his estranged mother, he's drinking too much, he's desperately worried about the state of the country during Trump's administration, he wants to live with his girlfriend, but she won't commit to sharing his home, a farmstead where he is deeply rooted, and to top it all, he's conflicted because he tampered with evidence and lied about it. When it all becomes too much, he quits his job. But then his mother shows up, asking him to look into a missing Black student who complained about bullying from her white sorority sisters before disappearing.

He begins to look into it, even though he is filled with fury at his mother and is sure he can't trust her. The trail takes him to a planned community for workers at a chicken and pork processing plant that looks eerily like something from the 1950s by way of a 1920s company town.

I confess I got a little tired of Darren's anguish at times, and the ending is thought-provokingly unresolved, but Locke's descriptions of East Texas continue to bring to life a natural world and the Black Texans who call it home as well as weaving together richly complex characters in a complicated story that addresses the role of race in a time and place where the stakes are especially high.

Texas Ranger Darren Mathews is facing a potential indictment and he’s desperately holding on to his life when he receives a visit from his estranged mother who feeds him a story about Sera, a possibly missing Black college student whose white sorority sisters claim she isn’t missing at all. Darren has to determine if his mother’s story is true and he begins investigating both Sera and her shady hometown, uncovering troubling information, some of which may impact his own case.

“…the fever dream that had been the years since Donald Trump was elected,” is the time period during which this story is set and Mathews (and Locke) have a clear point of view about it. It’s one I agree with, as I think most right thinking people do, but there will likely be some who pick up the book and take exception to the politics. If you are that someone, then don’t read this, you won’t like it.

I read BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD, but didn’t read the second book in the series, and felt like I was fine and would have been OK with this as a standalone, although I was happy to have the rich backstory of Darren’s relationships with his uncles.

I’m a bit torn about this book. The language and the writing are lovely. For example, the description of the bricks of the sorority houses as different, delicious foods, loved that. Locke makes you feel, smell and taste the Texas heat and dust. But the plotting this time seemed a bit juvenile. Are people that openly racist in Texas? And Thornhill was just so blatantly illegal, most teenagers would have understood it, but tons of adults didn’t? I couldn’t buy that. So, I couldn’t entirely embrace this.