The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog.

Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke is a nicely woven mystery set in rural East Texas.  Two murders occur in just a matter of days in a tiny town called Lark. Are the two crimes related?  That’s just one of the questions being explored by principal character Darren Matthews, an African-American who dropped out of law school after two years, to become a Texas Ranger. Darren’s current standing with the Rangers is clouded by his questionable involvement with a defendant in another trial, but he remains the key to unraveling these two murder mysteries. The townspeople distrust him because he is not one of their own.  Local law enforcement, suspicious because he is a Ranger, won’t cooperate due to turf issues.

One of the two murder victims in Lark, Michael, was a Black lawyer from Chicago who came to town for reasons that are initially unclear. His wife is a successful Black business woman from Chicago, who comes to Lark to claim his body.

The other murder victim is a white woman, whom Michael had met in a bar. Her husband is a member of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas.  The bar owner is Geneva, an older Black woman with a murky history with a white mobster whose lavish home sits just across the street from her bar.  Geneva’s jazz musician husband had been shot and killed several years before this story unfolds, in a crime never solved. Is that killing linked in any way to the first two?

The untangling of these murders and all the intertwined relationships keep coming back to questions of prejudice. Who is suspected and who gets charged? Whose murder is race-related? Whose is rooted in garden-variety marital jealousy? Which law enforcement officer is biased and which can be trusted? All of these questions challenge Darren.

Author Locke deftly lays out the tenacity of longstanding racial bias, rural small town power structures, long-term grudges and community loyalties. She is an excellent story teller, providing cinematic rendering of the lives of people, their rough existence, the unhealthy food they eat, their drinking patterns and more.  You can practically smell the rich red soil of rural East Texas, the characters booze-filled breath, the pork cooking on the stove, and the heavy scent of fried pies. Despite the satisfaction of mysteries solved, Locke leaves the reader with a sense of ambiguity, much as in real life.

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout takes us back to fictional small town Crosby, Maine, where so much of her writing is based.  In this recent book, we meet up again with her characters from Olive Kitteridge; Olive Again; Oh,William; Amy and Isabelle; Lucy by the Sea and more. Quotidien lives are the background tapestry for the pulsing narrative thread of a murder and a suicide. As always, Strout takes small conversations and observations of everyday life to build, as she puts it, a series of stories of how people live.

Olive herself, snappish as ever, invites writer Lucy Barton to visit for the purpose of telling her a story she finds of interest, a tale that, Olive speculates, Lucy may want to use in a book. Lucy, for her part, goes on regular walks with retired lawyer Bob Burgess and shares with him Olive’s story and other gossipy tidbits.

The themes and questions raised in this book are classic Strout – Do people really care beyond their own experiences? Can older folks especially thrive without the touch of other human beings?  How can one truly and meaningfully be heard? For Olive, as for Strout, everyone has a story.  If you enjoy traveling to Crosby, Maine, you’ll find this a comfortable trip home.  But you may also discover, as I did, that this is a journey too well trodden to make another time.