Having spent the last month reading about aging, dying, and death, I needed something entirely different.  The NYT Sunday Book Review’s September 27th issue was devoted to “The 50 Best Thrillers of the 21st Century”, and I thought that would be a good place to start.  To begin with, I checked the ones on their list that I had already read, a surprisingly low 13.  Happily, that left 37 that were available.  I then tried to count the number of times a book had appeared on the curated list provided by five authors whose books were on the list.  From that group, I selected the one with the most mentions, “Bluebird, Bluebird”.  I was not disappointed.

The action is situated in Lark, Texas, population 200 in the northeast corner of the state.  The book begins with Geneva Sweet setting out a picnic lunch for her late husband, Joe, Sr. and her late son, Joe Jr. in the local cemetery. Geneva is the proprietor of Geneva Sweet’s Sweets, the local diner begun by her when Black folks weren’t allowed into the local eatery.  The action begins when a second dead body is found in the bayou behind Geneva’s diner, one Black man and one white woman.  Enter Darren Matthews, one of the few Black Texas Rangers, who is informed by a friend at the FBI about the deaths and who drives to Lark on his own initiative and gets embroiled in not only these murders but in a grand jury probe of another one in his hometown.  When a six year old murder of Joe Sr. resurfaces, the county coroner, sheriff, and Darren are kept busy trying to sort out the murderers.  Fine ending with enough of a credible surprise to be satisfying.

The writing is excellent amping up the tension as the information about all four murders, often contradictory, accumulates.  I tend to enjoy thrillers in settings which I am familiar with and East Texas is definitely not one of those, but I thoroughly enjoyed this book’s 300 pages, racing through it in two days.  Easy to see why S. A. Cosby put this book at the top of his Top Ten.