BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD (Highway 59 Mystery #1) by Attica Locke



Winner of the 2018 Edgar Award for Best Novel.
Published by Hachette Audio in 2017.
Read by JD Jackson.
Duration: 9 hours, 25 minutes.
Unabridged.

Darren Mathews is a rare thing - a black Texas Ranger. He is also suspended for getting involved in a situation with a man with Aryan Brotherhood ties that ended up murdered soon afterwards. 

 A friend in the FBI tells him about another situation, way out in a small town on Highway 59 in East Texas at the edge of a bayou. Two bodies have been found in the bayou - one black and one white.

The first body was a black man - beaten nearly to death and then drowned in the bayou. The second was a white woman, found floating in the bayou a few days later.

So, Mathews heads off to this little town and starts nosing around with no authorization. He discovers a little cafe run by an elderly black woman on one end of town and a bar owned by her white neighbor on the other end of town - a bar that regularly plays host to the Aryan Brotherhood. In between them is a lot of history.

Mathews thinks he has the situation figured out before he even arrives but the more he digs, the more complicated everything gets...

This book won the 2018 Edgar Award for Best Novel. The Edgar Award goes to the best mystery and the mystery in the story was quite good. The story itself was slow to develop, however. The pacing of the novel was sacrificed a bit in order to create more tone and mood in a book that was filled with tone and mood. 

 The audiobook was read by JD Jackson. He voiced the characters with a multitude of unique voices and did quite a good job.

 I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD (Highway 59 Mystery #1) by Attica Locke.

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