It's not even past.' Locke's insistence on grounding her story in a deeper history pays off because it invests the book with gravitas, a sense of place and consequence, that feels profound and real. I don't want to give anything away among the most compelling aspects of the novel is the steady way Locke deepens her narrative, reminding us that, as Faulkner wrote, 'The past is never dead. Throughout 'The Cutting Season,' Locke refuses to take such sentiments for granted, contrasting them with the reality of life on the plantation, where a black worker is railroaded for the murder despite compelling evidence to the contrary, and what's unspoken between Caren's family and the Clancys refuses to remain beneath the surface, where it has simmered since the 1870s. That's great writing, the kind that gives you goose bumps - not just because of what it says about the character but also it feels so true. She wondered what her mother would have made of that, if she'd lived to see it.' 'She'd gone over that ballot three or four times,' Locke writes of Caren, 'standing alone in the booth, tracing a finger under the first line, the word President. On the one hand, the lines appear to be redrawn, less between whites and blacks than between blacks and migrant workers, 'Mexicans mostly, and some Guatemalans, plucked out of rice fields and fruit groves for a few months of working Louisiana sugarcane.'įor Caren - college-educated, with two years of law school - or her ex-boyfriend, Eric, father of her 9-year-old daughter, Morgan, and an attorney in the Obama administration, the 2008 election symbolizes a new level of opportunity. The Louisiana Locke portrays prides itself on being, in some important sense, post-racial, but those old divisions, those old distrusts and hatreds, linger. Yet if that novel explored, in part, the betrayals of the 1960s, this one has a more ambitious reach. This is what Locke did with 'Black Water Rising,' using crime fiction to examine a broader world.

The cutting season a novel