Reviews - Au Paradis Je Demeure

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Popsugar 2022: a different book by an author you read in 2021.

This sequel to Bluebird, Bluebird continues chronicling the life of a Black Texas Ranger and the tangles he faces when dealing with racism and crime. Darren Mathews is following in the footsteps of both of his uncles (one uncle was a Ranger and one is a lawyer). Torn between two paths, Darren ultimately decided to become a Ranger himself. This book carries over a problem from the first one. Darren defended a family friend who was suspected of murder but found out at the end of the last book that the gun used to commit the murder had been hidden at this friend's house. Before he could do anything about this incriminating evidence, Darren's mother let him know that she had possession of the gun. She used this to blackmail Darren into helping her out financially and physically with anything she needed done. Darren's mother, an addict and manipulator, was stepping up her demands at the beginning of the current book.

Darren needed to leave town for a case and wasn't able to do what his mother wanted. In his efforts to keep her from revealing what she knew, he ended up drawing more people into the situation. This would have been enough for an interesting book, but most of the book actually concerns Darren's new case.

This case is about a missing white boy, the son of white supremacist parents who are squatting on land owned by a black man( the last of a free Black post-Civil war community) and also used by the Indigenous tribe that are linked to the man's family for generations past. Darren ends up in yet another ugly mess made more complicated by racist people who for reasons of their own want a powder keg situation. He has to step carefully around the local police and the local heavy hitters in town, look for a boy that everyone believes is dead, work around an FBI case with its own motivations and goals and also deal with his wife, who has her own agenda around their marriage. None of this is helped by Darren struggling with his drinking problem.

This is modern Southern Gothic. The dripping branches of the cypress that keep any sun from showing on parts of the lake where the boy disappeared, the Southern town with secrets to keep, a flawed hero who is distracted by his own problems, it's all there, plus the ugly racism that is never far from the surface in these stories. I especially liked Darren's family friend (a local historian) describing the true history under the sanitized history that is the town's story of itself. There's often another layer of history under the pretty public version and that history is often more interesting and explains more.

I'd happily read more in this series. The only issue I have is that the author seems to be putting her finger heavily on the scales of Darren's marriage problems, and it feels like his wife is made out to be the bad one in order to keep Darren sympathetic. I don't find him especially sympathetic in this issue, especially because he keeps hiding things from his wife.