The Cutting Season

August 6, 2012
Locke follows her debut, Black Water Rising, with a convoluted tale about the Louisiana antebellum plantation Belle Vie and two multigenerational families that have occupied it for more than a century. Caren Gray, whose great-great-great grandfather was a slave, manages the entire staff for Belle Vie, which caters weddings and parties and stages shows about plantation life in the old days. The Clancys trace their lineage back to William Tynan, who acquired the plantation after the Civil War. Patriarch Leland Clancy’s wife restored the mansion now run by her son Raymond. The discovery of the body of a cane field worker from the adjacent farm on Belle Vie property triggers a chain of events that embroils Caren, her nine-year-old daughter, the Clancys, and others in an investigation that finds its antecedents in the two families’ entwined histories. The murder and its solution take second place as Locke charts the South’s troubled progress since slavery through a surfeit of subplots. Agent: Richard Abate, 3 Arts Entertainment.

May 15, 2012

Locke follows up her multiple-prize-nominated debut, Black Water Rising, with a story set in contemporary Louisiana but freighted with implications from the past. A young woman is found with her throat cut on the antebellum plantation Belle Vie. Locals are angry about migrant labor and the corporate takeover of the area's small family farms, but estate manager Caren Gray turns elsewhere for a solution. Fingers crossed for this sophomore effort.

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