Review by New York Times Review
As she managed to do so well in her first novel, "Black Water Rising," Locke draws on the past to remind her characters how much it has shaped their identities and how much it continues to shape the choices they make. The de facto historian at Belle Vie is Caren Gray, who grew up there as the daughter of a plantation cook and has been this tourist attraction's general manager ever since she and her 9-year-old daughter left New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Although Caren is almost frighteningly self-possessed, her sang-froid is shaken when she stumbles over the body of a murdered migrant worker employed by the giant sugarcane operation adjacent to Belle Vie. The police are quick to suspect Donovan Isaacs, a member of the troupe of actors who perform a scripted re-enactment of the plantation's role in the Civil War. In coming to Donovan's defense, Caren is startled to discover that this young firebrand - entrusted with such deathless dialogue as: "Dem Yankee whites can't make me leave dis here land. Dis here mah home. Freedom weren't meant nothing without Belle Vie" - recently quit school to film his own corrective version of local history. For a character so smart and so appealing, Caren is astonishingly dense about a lot of things that are going on behind her back. Even more astounding is her disinclination to follow up on the shocking revelations that bring the mystery to a close. But if the schematic plot and dangling resolution speak badly for Locke's construction values, the language of her storytelling is sturdy and absorbing. Who can resist the opening scene of a wedding in which a cottonmouth "measuring the length of a Cadillac" falls from a live oak into the lap of the bride's future mother-in-law, then is brushed away with the observation that "it only briefly stopped the ceremony, this being Louisiana after all." Scandinavian sadism, which took a nose dive after the untimely death of Stieg Larsson, perked up when the Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen muscled onto the scene with "The Keeper of Lost Causes," which devised a special cold-case division called Department Q for a maverick homicide cop named Carl Morck. Although relegated to the basement and presented with a Syrian maintenance man as an assistant, Morck managed to find a female politician who had been kept captive and starved for five years. Morck and his colleague, Assad, are still in the basement in THE ABSENT ONE (Dutton, $26.95), but they've been joined by Rose Knudsen, a gifted researcher who never made it out of the police academy but proves invaluable on an investigation involving a group of Copenhagen millionaires who get erotic thrills from tracking and killing exotic animals. Adler-Olsen may lack Larsson's political passion, but he brings great inventiveness to descriptions of the techniques of torture, which keeps the sadistic brutality from becoming repetitive or even (God help us) dull. There's nothing shameful about love, so no reader should feel embarrassed about mourning the loss of a beloved sleuth like Marshal Guarnaccia, the kindly detective who figured in the Florentine mysteries of Magdalen Nabb, who died in 2007. But Florence is still in good hands, entrusted to a private investigator named Sandro Cellini, who keeps a wary eye on the ancient city in a string of mysteries by Christobel Kent. It took me a while to catch up with the "impatient, irascible, impetuous" Cellini, who is more temperamentally akin to Aurelio Zen, the detective in Michael Dibdin's politically charged mysteries. THE DEAD SEASON (Pegasus, $25.95) isn't the first book in this series, but it's a terrific introduction to the intractable problems of a modern-day city plagued by illegal immigrants, an exhausted economy and a broken system of government. Call them what she will, Laura Lippman's out-of-series "mysteries" tend to be extended character studies of interesting women caught up in unusual circumstances that can get a little dicey without posing a convincing threat to life, limb or personal happiness. AND WHEN SHE WAS GOOD (Morrow/HarperCollins, $26.99) runs true to form, but as usual, the circumstances are so extraordinary that the absence of tension tends to be forgotten - if not forgiven. Heloise Lewis, the heroine of Lippman's latest nota-mystery, is a single mother with an 11-year-old son who keeps an extremely low profile in her suburban Maryland community. She calls herself a "socially progressive libertarian," lobbies on behalf of underemployed women and belongs to an unorthodox, and highly entertaining, church. But behind the scenes, Heloise is actually the madam of a high-priced call girl operation that requires an authorial struggle to turn into something capable of attracting a serious criminal element. Without taking away from the nice character profiling, Lippman's effort falls flatter than Heloise's attempt to play at being a soccer mom. Attica Locke's mystery opens with a snake falling into the lap of the brides future mother-in-law.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 7, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
In this atmospheric follow-up to Black Water Rising (2009), Locke once again confronts matters of race and conscience. Some days, Caren Gray can hardly believe she is still rooted to Belle Vie, the Louisiana plantation where she grew up, where her mother was a cook and her great-great-great-grandfather was a slave. Now the single mother to a nine-year-old daughter, she manages the showplace, which has long been owned by the prosperous Clancy family and is a popular site for weddings and banquets. Despite the beauty of the house and grounds, Caren still feels uneasy whenever she visits the former slave quarters, a stark reminder of the antebellum plantation's notorious past. When a cane worker is found with her throat slit, Caren is drawn into the investigation as the police target one of her employees as the murderer. Soon, though, Caren learns some rather unsavory information about the Clancy family and their nefarious dealings in both the past and the present. This is a nuanced look at the South's tragic past and one strong woman's stand against ingrained cultural and economic oppression.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Locke follows her debut, Black Water Rising, with a convoluted tale about the Louisiana antebellum plantation Belle Vie and two multigenerational families that have occupied it for more than a century. Caren Gray, whose great-great-great grandfather was a slave, manages the entire staff for Belle Vie, which caters weddings and parties and stages shows about plantation life in the old days. The Clancys trace their lineage back to William Tynan, who acquired the plantation after the Civil War. Patriarch Leland Clancy's wife restored the mansion now run by her son Raymond. The discovery of the body of a cane field worker from the adjacent farm on Belle Vie property triggers a chain of events that embroils Caren, her nine-year-old daughter, the Clancys, and others in an investigation that finds its antecedents in the two families' entwined histories. The murder and its solution take second place as Locke charts the South's troubled progress since slavery through a surfeit of subplots. Agent: Richard Abate, 3 Arts Entertainment. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Caren Gray faces down the ugly history of slavery daily-she manages the Belle Vie plantation for its owners, the Clancy family. For generations, her family worked for the Clancys, and she and her nine-year-old daughter found refuge here after Hurricane Katrina. Caren's routine of coordinating school tours, weddings, and banquets is interrupted by the grisly discovery of a migrant worker's body on the property. The police zero in on a suspect, but Caren is unconvinced they have their man. Her investigation unearths more than she bargained for-and she realizes how widespread the repercussions of slavery still ripple. VERDICT Locke's second novel (after 2009's Black Water Rising) is a layered, nuanced mystery with a social conscience. Weaving legal, social, historical, and economic elements into the story of a changing family, it's a good choice for readers who enjoy multifaceted mysteries with a strong female protagonist and that blur genre distinctions. [See Prepub Alert, 4/23/12; author Dennis Lehane picked this title as his first selection for his eponymous imprint at HarperCollins.-Ed.]-Amy -Brozio-Andrews, Albany P.L., NY (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A lush plantation is the scene of what could be the perfect murder. As manager of Belle Vie, an antebellum estate 50 miles south of Baton Rouge and an equal distance from New Orleans to the east, Caren Gray burns the candle at both ends. She supervises the staff and produces weddings and parties at the plantation while trying to raise her preteen daughter, Morgan. Also under her supervision is a historical play called The Olden Days of Belle Vie, which keeps the memory of 19th-century Louisiana alive for better or worse. Currently in a rebellious phase, Morgan plays her father, Eric, who's estranged from Caren and has moved to Chicago for a job, against her mother. Fieldworker Luis' discovery of a body facedown in a shallow, makeshift grave complicates an already challenging day for Caren. The victim is a young woman, her throat slit. Local police swarm Belle Vie as Caren confronts the problem of missing actor Donovan Isaacs, unwelcome freeloader Bobby Clancy and Morgan's customary moods. After she finds blood on her daughter's blouse, Caren goes into defensive mode when Morgan's explanations are iffy. As Detective Jimmy Bertrand and his team dig deeper, everyone at Belle Vie gets edgier. Locke's second novel (Black Water Rising, 2009) is written with fluidity and elegance, evoking the uniqueness of her setting and the nuances in the relationships of her characters, complicated by race, class and history. Her whodunit plot often seems like a MacGuffin but could well strike readers as a bonus.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
