Guide Me Home

I’ve only posted one review of Attica Locke’s books here (The Cutting Season (2012)) but I have assiduously read everything she publishes. So I was looking forward to the final installment of the Highway 59 trilogy, Guide Me Home (2024), which follows now-retired Texas Ranger Darren Matthews as he adjusts to life in retirement and dealing with all of the morally-questionable things he has done.

I am not a Texan, but I drive from the midwest to Houston about every year to visit family, and so have a passing familiarity with the places that Locke describes so vividly and with great love in her novels. Locke is a native Texan, with roots in East Texas going back five generations, and she brings an authentic sense of place to everything she writes, including Guide Me Home, which has probably the most emotional depth of the novels in the trilogy.

Raised by his twin uncles, a Texas Ranger and a law professor, after his father’s death and mother’s abandonment, Darren Mathews is tired and possibly facing indictment. When he returns home, looking forward to a reunion with his photographer girlfriend, and finds his mother, who had given the DA a gun used to kill a man that has Darren being investigated for murder, wanting his help with something weird about a missing black girl, he is done with her and drinks enough for his girlfriend to leave before she had planned.

Although he doesn’t want to, he decides, after sobering up, that it couldn’t hurt to ask a few questions at the girl’s sorority. And what he finds just whets his curiosity, leading him to the girl’s home, a planned gated community that supports a poultry processing plant. Inside, things seem even stranger, so after he is escorted out when his time for visiting is up, he decides to follow up with his mother who is taking care of her brother, Pete, who had had a stroke and who he didn’t remember, as his uncles kept him away from her family.

Meeting his uncle and getting to know his newly-sober mother in a new way affects Darren more than he expects, and he learns things about his origins that challenge everything he thought he knew. The author Kate Quinn describes in her Goodreads review of Guide Me Home that Locke’s books are a masterclass on “biting social commentary skillfully wrapped inside family drama which is in turn wrapped inside a cunningly plotted mystery” and I wholeheartedly agree!

I loved the fact that no one dies! Complicated people make difficult choices, and Darren finally learns about all of his family. And it was completely weight-neutral, no negative descriptions of body size or fat people. I highly recommend anything and everything Attica Locke writes.