Heaven, My Home

"It’s the second book in the series, but you don’t have to read the first one. Like Megan Abbott, Locke is a fantastic writer. In the UK, did you have The Lone Ranger —the kids’ cartoon? Rangers are very storied in American history. They always wear white hats and cowboy boots. In law enforcement, they’re the smart ones. As with most police systems in America, the Texas Rangers started with racism. They were meant to fight the native people and force them off their land into Mexico. Then they were dissolved because the Civil War happened, and the federal government took over border patrol. Then the Rangers were reestablished as a state police, like the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. The fact that Locke has a Black Ranger in this book is really daring. They exist, but Rangers are predominantly white. It breaks with history. When I read about the first novel, I thought, ‘Wow, that is really interesting.’ I like this novel because he gets called to a case. There’s a missing boy, and the family are a bunch of white supremacists. They live in a town that makes its money from tourism by being an antebellum town. They romanticize what’s called ‘the Lost Cause’ narrative, which is, ‘Slavery wasn’t that bad. My ancestors didn’t own slaves.’ That kind of shit. It reminds me a lot of the town I grew up in. In school I was a really horrible student. I seemed to lack focus. I didn’t tell people I was writing. My stepmother really fixated on a girl who was a couple of classes above me who made money by being a Scarlett O’Hara impersonator. She would show up at the Piggly Wiggly, dressed as Scarlett O’Hara and passing out sausage for free. This was perfectly normal. She was in a car commercial. It was very lucrative. She paid her own way through college—you’ve got to give her props for that. I remember my stepmother saying to me, ‘She’s really doing well for herself.’ I said, ‘I look nothing like Scarlett O’Hara, and I’m not going to wear an antebellum dress.’ But there was a lot of pressure for me to do that. When I read this novel, I thought, ‘I know that town. I know exactly everything to do with it.’ I’m from Georgia, like Margaret Mitchell, who arguably codified the Lost Cause . In the book, you see it through the eyes of Darren Matthews, the Ranger. He just wants to do his job. He wants to find the kid. He wants to take care of this community, even though they hate him and they’re nasty to him. He has his own trouble going on in his home life because of the last case he worked. It’s a very rich story, from a perspective I’ve never read before. That’s what I like about it. Texas Rangers are these great, wonderful people, and here’s this guy who is everything a Ranger embodies, and people hate him because of the color of his skin. Plus it’s very pacy. If I was going to teach a class on writing thrillers—which I wouldn’t, I’d be a horrible teacher—I would use Attica Locke and Mo Hayder . She could plot more tightly than any other author I’ve ever met. It was just so fucking precise. She was amazing."