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.