Murder in the Bayou - Black Water Rising by Attica Locke

I have been wanting to read is Black Water Rising by Attica Locke since I saw it had been shortlisted for this year’s Orange Prize for fiction by a women. Like Peter Temple’s “Truth”, which won the 2010 Miles Franklin Award, Black Water Rising is a crime novel, although with more in common with thrillers than the forensic crime that litters our TV screens and discount stores.

Last week, I picked up a copy and started reading it and couldn’t put it down. What a great book. Set in Houston, America in the 1980’s, and with the memory of Martin Luther King and the fight to end segregation still very foremost in people’s minds, the story has as it’s backdrop rising oil prices and the threat of a strike on the Houston docks which could shut down an economy that is highly dependent on the movement of oil.

We meet the main character, Jay, at night on the Bayou. A struggling African American lawyer whose main source of income is from personal injury claims, Jay is taking his wife on a “scenic” boat ride down the Bayou as a birthday present, courtesy of one of his clients. The stage is set for the finale of the evening: the boat is dirty and run down, the Bayou creepy and mysterious in the murky light. Suddenly, they hear a woman’s scream, gunshot, and then a body falling into the Bayou. Should Jay instruct the boat owner to keep on going and not get involved or should he heed his wife’s urging to help the person in trouble? Jay has personal experience of being black and at the mercy of the Southern legal system after nearly going to jail for something he didn’t do as a young, passionate, protester against segregation.  He is reluctant to stop but his natural sense of doing the right thing compels him to help and he dives in to save the woman, starting a series of events that Jay can’t escape.

Black Water Rising is part thriller, part social justice commentary. There is plenty of suspense, the odd standover man, corporate no-goods, and a little mystery about Jay’s relationship with the new mayor – a white woman he used to know very well in college before his life turned upside down. Colour is provided by the proposed dock strike, as Jay is asked by his father-in-law to take on the police department on behalf of a young dock worker who is accusing a senior union official of beating him up and the police doing nothing. The novel is pacey, and the plot cleverly strung together, while also giving insight to some of the history surrounding the fight to end segregation in America.

If you are interested in the other novels shortlisted for the Orange Prize this year, you might want to try:

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver (Winner)
The Very Thought of You by Rosie Alison
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
A Gate at the Stairs by Morrie Moore
White Woman, Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey