The slaves stand around the Louisiana plantation house wearing tattered calico and head scarves. They’re greeting party guests at Belle Vie, an antebellum manse turned tourist attraction. For $10.75 an hour, it’s not bad work.  They’re also actors in the dreadful little historical pageant that the place puts on for tourists. The play, “The Olden Days of Belle Vie,” is “full of belles and balls and star-crossed lovers, noble Confederates and happy darkies and more dirty Yankees than you could count.” Sample dialogue for white actors: “Ah, ma chère, we shall make a fine life here indeed.” Sample dialogue for blacks: “Dem Yankee whites can’t make me leave dis here land. Dis here mah home.”  The cast members don’t much care how they’re being used, though a few develop Pirandellian attachments to the characters they play. But it’s all in a day’s work, and it beats the kind of laboring Belle Vie’s pre-Civil War staff used to do. And however maudlin and dishonest this little drama may be, it delights the book clubs, party givers and sorority girls who eagerly treat the plantation as a piece of living history.  This is the setting for “The Cutting Season,” the second novel by the impressively astute Attica Locke (after “Black Water Rising”). “The Cutting Season” is also the first book to appear under HarperCollins’s Dennis Lehane imprint, and it’s easy to see why Mr. Lehane selected it. Ms. Locke writes about Southern racial and class nuances in much the same way that Mr. Lehane sees those forces at work in Boston. Both authors specialize in apparently civilized settings where long-buried discord is always poised to erupt, usually with lethal consequences. Each is willing to use the murder mystery as a framework for much more ambitious, atmospheric fiction.  Ms. Locke’s main character, a black woman named Caren Gray, is planted right in the middle of Belle Vie’s uneasiness. She is the plantation’s manager, responsible for tasks like making sure there are no tire tracks near the perfectly-preserved slave quarters; those humble shacks are now immortalized in coffee table books, after all.  She is also the liaison between labor and management, the uneasy emissary of the estate’s wealthy owners. She keeps herself so diplomatically balanced between black and white that it’s easy to see why Ms. Locke named her Gray.  A little something else about Caren: She grew up at Belle Vie, where her mother was the cook. She has spent almost all her life there, but almost nobody on her staff knows it. In a book that is set in 2009, Caren has been managing the place only since 2005. She is so identified with New Orleans, where she spent her early adult years, that she is sometimes called Tulane. And although she was forbidden from entering the main plantation house when she was the cook’s child, she now runs the estate from her office there.  A cottonmouth as long as a Cadillac sets the mood for “The Cutting Season” by interrupting a wedding on the book’s very first page. This snake will not be the story’s only casualty. Caren soon learns that a dead body has been discovered in a shallow grave, and she immediately snaps into damage-control mode. The kinds of people who rent Belle Vie for catered parties do not want corpses around to spoil the festivities.  But Caren is stirred by the sight of the victim, a young Latina migrant worker and mother. She has a daughter of her own, Morgan, who may even have seen the killer. And there is more to this crime story than the death of one worker during Belle Vie’s sugarcane harvesting season; both the agribusiness using the farmland and the Clancy family, owners of Belle Vie, are forces to be reckoned with. Then there are the ghosts. Caren thinks that some of the original slaves, notably her great-great-great grandfather Jason, are still present at Belle Vie somehow.  Ms. Locke has all the necessary elements for a resonant story about a seemingly modern woman who is forced to come to terms with the long-buried past. And she has a strong heroine, even though Caren is oddly passive even when she aggressively tries to uncover Belle Vie’s secrets. She typically “watched in disbelief” as each new strange fact emerged, and she would get nowhere without the magical reappearance of Eric, Morgan’s father, who is conveniently well versed in the law. In a leisurely and luxuriantly Southern book that is rich with detail, the sketchy, forced denouement, drawing many neat parallels between past and present, jumps out of nowhere.  The book’s best feature is its plantation pageantry, along with the blindingly swoony reactions it prompts on all sides of the social and racial divide.  Most of Belle Vie’s latter-day workers are so caught up in fake slavery that they don’t see what suffering the migrant sugarcane workers endure. And the sugar workers’ boss is as cruel as any antebellum slave overseer.  At one point Caren goes to visit Raymond Clancy, who runs the estate, in his expensive urban office. “Caren couldn’t see the point of having all that money if all of it led to beige,” Ms. Locke writes about the décor. But Caren knows that her boots have tracked mud into Clancy’s pristine setting. And she isn’t one bit sorry.
In Attica Lockeâs âCutting Seasonâ a woman who grew up as the daughter of a cook on what was once a plantation now manages the house, which is a wedding hall and tourist attraction.