• The Cutting Season is the first title selected for publication under Dennis Lehane's eponymous line of books from HarperCollins.
 
• Black Water Rising was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, an Edgar Award (Best First Novel), an NAACP Image Award, and Britan’s Orange Prize. Booklist named it as one of the Best Debut Crime Novels of 2009.

 

Attica Locke’s debut novel, Black Water Rising, was hailed by critics nationwide and received multiple prize nominations. Now, the author compared to Scott Turow and Walter Mosley is back with an absorbing and atmospheric tale of murder and injustice that explores the enduring legacy of slavery.

For many native Louisianans, Belle Vie, the large antebellum plantation situated between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, is a symbol of beauty and the South’s genteel past. For others, it is a monumental reminder of the evils of slavery. The estate becomes the center of further controversy when a young woman is found lying face down in a shallow grave, her throat cut clean.

It doesn’t take long for the police to start compiling suspects. Was it an angry home grown laborer venting his rage at the migrant workers displacing the locals who’ve worked the cane fields for generations? Or was it someone striking out against Groveland, the predatory corporation buying up the area's small family farms?

When the investigation takes an unsavory turn, the estate’s manager Caren Gray is left with suspicions of her own. The search for answers will plunge her into the murky waters of the plantation’s history—into a centuries old mystery involving the plantation's slave quarters—and deep into her own past. But the further she digs, the more she realizes that the truth isn't as simple as it seems . . . and that a killer may be closer than she ever could have imagined.