On a personal level Caren clashes with Belle Vie ‘s cook, a job here mother once held. Throughout The Cutting Season Attica Locke reminds us of how the past continues to inform the present. She’d gone over that ballot three or four times, standing alone in the booth, tracing a finger under the first line, the word President ‘ (p35) She didn’t want to lose her say on a technicality. He’d actually run uncontested, but it was 2008, and she’d felt weird about leaving one of the spaces blank. “ She’d voted for him on last year’s election, even though she’d never seen the man in person. There are some brutal details in apparent throwaway asides here: There are the usual clues, false leads, obtuse cops, rogue reporters etc but on this Locke hangs a deep picture of recent and historic American south. For Caren that brings layers of trouble.īut as I said, The Cutting Season is barely about whodunit. Early one morning the body of a migrant woman from the neighbouring big corporate cane fields is found on the estate. Caren Gray is both manager and descendant of the estate’s former slaves. The identification of the killer is however secondary here to the setting, which in itself makes the murder a consequence.īelle Vie is a historic Louisiana plantation house turned museum & high end event venue. Attica Locke’s second novel opens with the discovery of a murder and concludes with the solving of that crime.
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