All is calm – until suddenly they hear a woman's scream, then gunshots, then the splash of a body hitting water. Short on cash but determined to mark his pregnant wife Bernie's birthday memorably, he hires a rickety old barge belonging to the cousin of one of his clients and takes her on a moonlit cruise along Houston's Buffalo Bayou. Jay Porter is a struggling lawyer with a strip-mall practice that mostly handles minor personal injury claims. We're in Houston, Texas in 1981, not long after Reagan's installation in the White House. The screenwriter Attica Locke's debut is one of them, but it's still a powerful and skilfully constructed conspiracy thriller – Chinatown without the air of despairing fatalism. S ome novels never quite recover from the brilliance of their opening chapters.
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