Black Water Rising, by Attica Locke, legal thriller

First off, I’m thrilled to have found Locke’s work. After the time-consuming search for legal thrillers, it was easy to find a copy of her book. By the end of the first chapter, I was “hooked” by her writing, and I’d also been moved to tears. Quite an accomplishment.

Summary:

In 1981, Houston lawyer Jay Porter struggles to elk out a living. His clients are poor, his practice is run from a strip mall, and he’s got a pregnant wife and a past felony arrest that haunts him. Then he saves a woman’s life from drowning–or worse. As the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished, and the woman’s secrets put Jay and his loved ones in danger. Her relationships with the powerful Houston oil corporations are more complicated than he realizes. The black longshoreman union workers are threatening to go on strike, and Jay’s father-in-law, a well-respected pastor, is urging him to represent the union in a civil lawsuit. But doing so makes him a target of the forces against the strike, including a female mayor, a woman he once loved and who betrayed him.

What didn’t work for me:

  1. The ending felt somewhat unresolved. There are some minor plot strings left dangling, but I believe it’s preparation for the sequel, Pleasantville.
  2. My other quibble is that Locke switches between the first and last names of minor characters within the same scene. A character named “Donnie Simpson” is called both Mr. Simpson and Donnie within a few lines. It gives the impression that there are two characters rather than one. I noticed the same issue in a scene with another lawyer, his client, and an oil corporation executive. This can be confusing.

What works for me:

  • Jay.

He is a “broken man” (pg. 249). His past felony arrest colors everything in his life. He narrowly escaped conviction because of one juror. Locke is good at finding the telling details that highlight his fears as a black man who escaped a felony charge.

His complicated connections with people he’d like to forget are integrated into the present conflict. He can’t avoid the woman who betrayed him. He can’t avoid his old friend from the civil rights movement. He can’t avoid his past, though he tries.

He’s torn between silence and speaking. His wife wants him to “let her inside” but he won’t. He can’t. Though his silence damages their relationship, he’s too afraid to break his habit of silence and lying. He monitors every encounter for signs of possible betrayal or danger. At one point, he drives to Pasadena, where a welcome sign states “Proud home to the KKK.”

I reacted with horror. Jay?

“In an odd way, Jay finds the sign comforting. He has come to appreciate these kinds of visual clues.” (Black Water Rising, pg. 133)

He muses that he feels the same about Confederate flags in truck windows. “It’s a caution before trouble starts, offering a clean window of time in which to make a run for it” (pg. 133). That’s not a view I, as a white woman, would have imagined. But Jay does. He is a vividly-drawn character.

  • The setting.

Locke uses everything from smells to the subject of a talk radio show to recreate Houston in the early 1980s. I noticed that she uses the call-in radio show both to reflect Jay’s internal tension and to increase tension about the strike, the threats of violence, and the differing viewpoints of the racial minority and majority.

  • The view of the legal system.

This is definitely not a typical middle-to-upper class white person’s point of view:

“That he’s an innocent man, as he was back then, all those years ago, is no real comfort. He knows cops and prosecutors have a natural talent for bending evidence, twisting the truth this way and that, all in the same of putting somebody behind bars.” (Black Water Rising, pg. 188)

Is this cynical? Maybe. Is it based on his experiences? Yes. Is he wrong? It depends on your viewpoint.

After saving the drowning woman’s life, he drops her off at the police station but won’t tell the police anything about their encounter:

“He knows first hand the long, creative arm of Southern law enforcement, knows when he ought to keep his mouth shut.” (Black Water Rising, pg. 22-23)

  • The other characters.

Locke vividly portrays people like the Reverend (his father-in-law), his wife Bernie, his friend/not-quite-legal investigator Rolly, even his sister-in-law Evelyn. The unsympathetic ones are well written, too. The almost-victimized female, other lawyers, the white female mayor: they are complex characters with competing motives. Some are desperate to shed their pasts. Others are trying to hold onto both the past and present. Even the walk-on people, like the other strikers, the union leadership, etc. are vivid to me.

  • The integration of past and present.

There are multiple flashback chapters about Jay’s past involvement in the civil rights movement as an idealistic college student. But I never felt jerked between past and present. Locke shows the effect of one on the other. The flashbacks make sense and work in the context of the present story line.

Bottom line: Read this book.