She balanced the plate on the headstone, then bent down to brush fallen needles from the graves, keeping a hand on a slab of granite at all times, ever mindful of her arthritic knees. She could feel their warmth through the bottom of the plate, their buttery scent softening the sharp sting of pine in the air. Two fried pies, perfect half-moons of hand-rolled dough filled with brown sugar and fruit and baptized in grease-Geneva’s specialty and Lil’ Joe’s favorite. Geneva opened the shopping bag and pulled out a paper plate covered in tinfoil, an offering for her only son. It belonged to another Joe Sweet, younger by forty years and just as dead. The one next to it was identical in shape and size. When she arrived at the final resting place of Joe “Petey Pie” Sweet, Husband and Father and, Forgive Him, Lord, a Devil on the Guitar, she set the radio carefully on top of the polished chunk of granite, snapping the power cord into its hiding place behind the headstone. She was lugging a paper shopping bag from the Brookshire Brothers in Timpson along with a small radio from which a Muddy Waters record, one of Joe’s favorites, whistled through the speakers- Have you ever been walking, walking down that ol’ lonesome road. She gave the cord a good tug, making her way up the modest hill, careful not to step on the graves themselves, only the well-worn grooves between the headstones, which were spaced at haphazard and odd angles, like the teeth of a pauper. Late morning sunlight pinpricked through the trees, dotting a constellation of light on the blanket of pine needles at Geneva’s feet as she snaked the cord between Mayva’s sister and her husband, Leland, Father and Brother in Christ. GENEVA SWEET ran an orange extension cord past Mayva Greenwood, Beloved Wife and Mother, May She Rest with Her Heavenly Father.

From a writer and producer of the Emmy winning Fox TV show Empire, Bluebird, Bluebird is a rural noir suffused with the unique music, color, and nuance of East Texas. Darren must solve the crimes - and save himself in the process - before Lark’s long-simmering racial fault lines erupt. When his allegiance to his roots puts his job in jeopardy, he travels up Highway 59 to the small town of Lark, where two murders - a black lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman - have stirred up a hornet’s nest of resentment. Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the lone star state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules - a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well.

“In Bluebird, Bluebird Attica Locke had both mastered the thriller and exceeded it.”-Ann Patchett A “heartbreakingly resonant” thriller about the explosive intersection of love, race, and justice from a writer and producer of the Emmy-winning Fox TV show Empire ( USA Today).

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