Attica Locke achieved immediate critical success with her first crime novel, Black Water Rising, in 2010, which was praised for its suspenseful plotting and exploration of personal and political corruption in past and present America. She has since published four other novels and is also a busy screenwriter and producer. The Cutting Season (2012), with its blending of the mystery and crime genres, and blurring of distinctions between the fictional and the real world, recently became a set text for Edexcel A-level English literature and would be an excellent NEA choice for other exam specifications.
The novel’s protagonist, Caren Gray, is the manager of Belle Vie, a wedding venue and tourist destination in Louisiana which was a sugar cane plantation before the American Civil War. (The novel’s title refers to the time of year when the sugar cane is harvested.) Caren’s ties to Belle Vie are personal as well as professional: her mother, Helen, used to be the cook at the main house, and Caren, who is African American, grew up in the impoverished parish adjacent to the estate. She notes dryly that she ‘was never allowed in the main house as a kid’, and we infer that it is a sign of the changing times as well as her own career success that Caren now has the run of the former plantation and lives on site in the old overseer’s residence.
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