Jay Porter (Attica Locke) Books in Order

The Jay Porter novels trace the life of a Houston lawyer who cannot quite leave his activist past behind. Set across the 1980s and 1990s, they mix legal suspense with city politics, labor battles, and the complicated rise of a Black middle class in Texas.

Jay Porter starts out as a small time personal injury attorney working from a shabby office, far from the high powered career he once imagined. As a young man he was swept up in Black student activism and nearly went to prison on a serious charge, and those scars, along with the loss of his father to racist violence, have made him cautious, wary of the police, and deeply protective of his family.

In Black Water Rising, set in 1981, Jay takes his pregnant wife on a birthday boat ride on Houston’s bayou and hears gunshots in the dark. He hauls a terrified woman from the water and decides not to call the police, a choice that soon entangles him in a murder investigation linked to a looming dockworkers’ strike, big oil money, and the political ambitions of an old flame who is now the city’s mayor.

By the time of Pleasantville, the mid 1990s have arrived, Jay is a widower raising two children, and Houston is gripped by a bitter mayoral election. When a teenage campaign volunteer from the historically Black neighborhood of Pleasantville goes missing, he finds himself representing her family and the community at large, navigating voter outreach operations, shadowy campaign tactics, and the question of who really speaks for the neighborhood.

The cases are tightly plotted, but the heart of the series lies in how Jay weighs survival against principle, and what it costs him to keep fighting.

Together the two novels offer a portrait of Houston over time, from oil port to ballot box, seen through the eyes of someone who knows both protest marches and courtroom procedure. You can read either book on its own, yet starting with Black Water Rising makes Jay’s journey in Pleasantville feel even more earned and bittersweet.