I read a lot of mystery/suspense fiction and I often can't recall the details of most of them a month later. This book will be the rare work I'll be able to remember for a long time.
The premise of the story is prosaic. Take an 180 acre estate with a history that goes back over 200 years and is now operated as a tourist attraction and a venue for weddings and business events. It's resident caretaker, Caren Gray, is a young woman who's own family has ties going back generations to the property. Add two brothers, sons of the very old owner, one of whom -- Raymond Clancy -- has expensive political ambitions, and the other -- Bobby --is a loser.
The action starts with Caren discovering the body of Ines Avalo, one of the undocumented immigrants working on the acreage adjacent to the estate, rented out to an agricultural corporation.
As events unfold, this modern day mystery gets complicated with questions about a man named Jason who mysteriously disappeared at the time the estate came into the hands of the Clancy family. A newspaper reporter is very curious about Avalo's death and a young employee on the estate, Donovan Isaac, has ideas about what happened to Jason in that long ago era.
Not an especially original plot line one would think. But wait. Some details, I've omitted in the above summary, turn The Cutting Season into a fascinating, uncommon story.
The estate is Bellle Vie, a plantation in Louisiana; the field being harvested by the immigrants is sugar cane, just as it was when once worked by slaves. The Clancys are white; their ancestors took over the plantation after the Civil War when the original owners of Belle Vie abandoned the property.
Caren is African-American; Jason, the man who disappeared in 1872, was her great, great, great grandfather. He had stayed on at Belle Vie as a freed man hoping to be reunited with the wife who had been sold away from him when they were enslaved.
Caren's own immediate past has ties to Belle Vie. Her mother worked on the estate as a cook to the Clancys (before the plantation was turned into a living museum), so Caren grew up knowing the Clancy sons in the kind of complex black/white way of the South. Which is how Caren came to be offered the caretaker job by Raymond Clancy when she came "home" after fleeing New Orleans ahead of hurricane Katrina.
The author, Attica Locke, grabbed my attention and set the atmosphere of the story with this beginning:
"It was during the Thompson-Delacroix wedding, Caren's first week on the job, that a cottonmouth, measuring the length of a Cadillac, fell some twenty feet from a live oak on the front lawn, landing like a coil of rope in the lap of the bride's future mother-in-law. It only briefly stopped the ceremony, this being Louisiana after all."
As the plot develops, full use is made of the atmospherics of the isolated property. At various times Caren has to be out on the grounds in the pitch black quiet of night to deal with unexplained goings on. As caretaker, she must visit the area known as "the quarters" where the last cabin on the left, once Jason's home, has an unsettling aura to her. The lush beauty of the ante-bellum world is described through the eyes of visitors to Belle Vie.
Ms. Locke is equally artful in drawing characters. Raymond Clancy can contemplate a political career because the family has a reputation of being good to Blacks. Young Donovan Isaacs, who thinks he's uncovered the truth about Jason, sneaks around at night, a would-be film maker, and ends of accused of the murder of Ines Avalo.
There's also a troop of men and women who dress up as owners and slaves to put on a play about the history of Belle Vie several times a day for tourists.
And, of course, there's Caren Gray, who during the course of the action deals with issues of what is "home" and who is "family."
I wouldn't characterize The Cutting Season as a "mystery story." The mystery elements in the book so plausibly arise from the setting and the history of the place that it's more of a story with some mysteries involved. As such, it is a well told, satisfying reading experience.
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