It is 2019, Donald Trump is still president, and Attica Locke’s protagonist Darren Mathews, one of the few Black men to be a Texas Ranger, can’t “shake this feeling that something truly awful was coming their way”. Guide Me Home (Viper) is the final instalment of Locke’s excellent Highway 59 series, and things aren’t going well for Darren. He’s drinking heavily – “managing his sense of doom was nearly a full-time job for Darren these days” – and has handed in his badge after lying and manipulating evidence (for good reasons) in his previous outing, Heaven, My Home. Then his mother, Bell, with whom he has a complicated, troubled relationship, shows up, and tells him that a girl has gone missing from the sorority house she cleans at a nearby college. “You know how they do with missing Black girls, how you can’t get no one to pay attention,” she tells him. Darren doesn’t want to listen, but finds himself digging into the mystery of a disappearance that even the girl’s own family don’t seem to care about. Lyrical, complex and deeply engaged with the simmering tensions beneath (and above) the surface of American life, this is top-quality crime fiction.
Blake Crouch’s science fiction thriller Dark Matter was recently adapted for television starring Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Connelly. Run (Macmillan), which Crouch self-published in 2011 and is now coming out in hardback, could plausibly take the same route. We follow a family – dad Jack (whom I envisioned as Edgerton), mum Dee (Connelly in my eyes), teenage daughter Naomi and young son Cole – as a series of brutal murders starts to sweep the US. Many people, but not all (for reasons that are made clear but not explicable), have been overtaken by a murderous rage and are killing all those who aren’t similarly murderous. Once you accept that premise, Run is a lot of fun, as Jack and co leave their home and embark on a wild dash for safety, constantly running out of petrol, searching for food, escaping people with guns, etc. It’s thrilling and ridiculous and filled with bits such as this: “Someone, he went on. Hands and knees. Mindless hours. Always climbing. Endless.”
