Attica Locke and her Ranger Darren Matthews are quickly becoming one of my favorite diversions, mostly because of her use of history and her evocative East Texas setting. The history of race relations informs Locke’s present-day plots in ways that help me understand how long memory is. Ranger Matthews is sent to Jefferson, TX on the shores of Caddo Lake, a body of water shared by Texas and Louisiana, to look into the disappearance of the son of a white supremacist figure. In the process he confronts the history of escaped slaves and the Native Americans who helped, and the town’s attempts to remake itself as an tourist spot for nostalgic whites. “This whole town is a lie,” observes a local junk shop owner. “Perpetuating and profiteering off a fraud—the fiction of bloodless prosperity, an antebellum life of civility and grace—while conveniently forgetting the lives that made this town possible” (239). Understanding this is integral to solving the mystery and Locke manages to unwind all the threads of the story in a way that does justice to the history’s integrity.