Houston's black longshoremen are threatening to strike, and Jay's father-in-law, an influential minister, wants him to represent a young man who claims he was beaten up by a port official. The plot unfolds against a backdrop of rising oil prices and union unrest. He even returns to the scene of the crime, as if he himself had committed it.
But when Jay learns that a man was indeed killed near the bayou that night, he feels compelled to dig deeper. For anyone else, that would be the end of it. So he and Bernie drive the woman to the nearest police station and leave her at the door. He's only too familiar with "the long, creative arm of Southern law enforcement": in his youth he was a Black Power activist who narrowly avoided being imprisoned on a trumped-up charge of conspiracy to murder. Instinctively, Jay dives into the murky river and emerges clutching a distressed but alive white woman whose refusal to tell him anything about what has happened to her he attributes – mistakenly – to her fear of his blackness.Īctually, her reticence echoes Jay's reluctance to get involved. All is calm – until suddenly they hear a woman's scream, then gunshots, then the splash of a body hitting water. Short on cash but determined to mark his pregnant wife Bernie's birthday memorably, he hires a rickety old barge belonging to the cousin of one of his clients and takes her on a moonlit cruise along Houston's Buffalo Bayou.
Jay Porter is a struggling lawyer with a strip-mall practice that mostly handles minor personal injury claims.
We're in Houston, Texas in 1981, not long after Reagan's installation in the White House. The screenwriter Attica Locke's debut is one of them, but it's still a powerful and skilfully constructed conspiracy thriller – Chinatown without the air of despairing fatalism. S ome novels never quite recover from the brilliance of their opening chapters.
0 kommentar(er)
