The Cutting Season [Kindle Edition]

I read Black Water rising when it came out on the strength of its reviews and thought it excellent

So often a second novel doesn't come close so I was a little worried.

The Cutting Season is really good.

It is excellent in terms of the development of a sense of menace. All explored against a a backdrop of love, politics, race, migrant workers and history. That makes it sound potentially horribly worthy. It isn't.

Also very clever is the use of the sanitised tourist location of the house and the reality of the horrors that took place in the past.

This is a complicated and atmospheric novel and I will definitely be distributing some Christmas copies to some of my nearest and dearest.

Belle Vie, a perfectly preserved antebellum estate on the banks of the Mississippi, is now a living museum-cum-theme park, a place for educational school trips and a grand setting for weddings. Caren Gray juggles her duties of managing the estate for the Clancy family with her responsibilities as a single parent. When the body of a murdered migrant worker from the adjoining sugar cane plantation is discovered in the Belle Vie grounds, Caren knows that her life is about to become decidedly more difficult.

So. Great. A whodunnit with an interesting backdrop and some Louisiana history of slave ownership thrown in for good measure. But then the author veers off into clumsily handled bits of Caren's back story (why, oh, why does there always have to be a back story?), her slave heritage, dark secrets, corporate greed and the Clancy clan's political ambitions. Before too long, you realise that Attica Locke has not been able to decide on the type of book she wished to write.

Caren comes across as an unsympathetic heroine; the inconsistencies of her character and her odd responses to the murder enquiry also render her unbelievable.

In fairness, this is only Attica Locke's second book and, by all accounts, her debut was very good indeed. Here, I feel that she has been ill-served by her editor/s who really should have guided her towards a more focused approach to the story and a more consistent take on her lead character.

This is a wonderful mix of detective story and social history. The slave experience in Louisiana combines with a modern take on life in the American South and is a real page turner, Highly recommended.