Award-winning screenwriter and novelist Attica Locke has been champing at the bit to swap her home town of Los Angles for the North Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate and the delights of next week’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival. “I’m thrilled to get a break from the hellscape in which I’m currently living,” she admits over Zoom.

“It is not great here in the United States, particularly not in Los Angeles. So it will be kind of buoyant and uplifting to see other people not having a boot on their neck.” The hellscape Locke refers to is, in general, America under Donald Trump’s second term as US President, and, more specifically, the ICE – US Immigration and Customs Enforcement – raids currently sweeping through LA and other big US cities.

Videos have shown agents swarming poor neighbourhoods and detaining farm workers, day labourers and street vendors. Earlier this week, dressed in camouflage, some carrying rifles, others on horseback or driving armoured vehicles, ICE officers marched through Los Angeles’ popular MacArthur Park mob-handed, as children played in a football field.

There has been widespread concern over the fact ICE is not targeting criminals or gang members – rather, going for the low-hanging fruit of undocumented migrants. And while she is American through and through, having grown up in Houston, Texas, where she was born in 1974, Locke has admitted: “I’m even afraid of not being let back into the country after this trip. I’m getting ready to take to the UK!”

In fact, there have been concerns about abuse of power, with opponents of Trump seemingly targeted by law enforcement. Several individuals have been denied entry to the US or had their visas revoked due to social media activity or criticism of Trump.

In May, former FBI director James Comey was investigated by the Secret Service after he shared then-deleted a social media post, which Republicans alleged was an incitement to violence against Trump.

Comey posted on Instagram a photo of seashells that spelled the numbers “8647” – captioned: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.” The number 86 can be slang for “to reject” or “to get rid of”, or even “to kill”, and Trump is the 47th US president.

For his part, Comey said: “I didn’t realise some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me, but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.”

While his Instagram post might have been slightly ill-conceived mischief-making, many were left wondering, if this can happen to a former head of the FBI, what does it mean for everyone else? Indeed, Locke continues: “I know I sound hyperbolic, but I’m literally living in a city where people are being rounded up. Everything is fair game. Things are very scary. It’s important you guys can be a holder of space for us and our stories, because there’s a threat of things disappearing.

“Harrogate, that place and that festival, has so much excitement for this crime and thriller genre we all love, and I just can’t wait. Though I know better this time to not try to do any kind of trivia night – or try to keep up with the drinking.”

As those attending the crime writing festival at Harrogate’s famed Old Swan Hotel will discover, and anyone who’s read her books knows, Locke does not pull her punches. Since her 2009 debut Black Water Rising, the African-American storyteller has never shied away from exploring the cracks and injustices in US society – a nation birthed in violence and built on the backs of slaves.

It sees the black lawman hand in his badge. He’s disillusioned by escalating white supremacy in both society and law enforcement, plus the spectre of criminal charges hanging over him like the sword of Damocles. But Mathews is unexpectedly drawn into an unofficial search for a black girl, who’s vanished from an all-white sorority. A journey into a snake’s den of deceit, where he’ll discover far more about his nation, and his own family history.

Locke admits having accidentally become a chronicler of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) effect after exploring politics, race and the complexities of people and place while writing the first Darren Mathews tale, Bluebird, Bluebird, during the 2016 US election campaign season.

“I knew Trump’s rhetoric was dangerous, that he was unearthing an ugliness we were all kind of ignoring, about white terrorism and racism that was hidden, and he gave a licence to come out,” she says, noting she never thought he would become President. “So when this nation then elected him, it changed my book overnight. Suddenly, I looked like this ‘Cassandra’, prophesying about everything, which was not my intent.”

The growing surge in politically fuelled violence in the US is not hyperbole or (crime) fiction, either. A 2023 Reuters study found the US was grappling with “the biggest and most sustained increase in political violence since the 1970s”. And unlike that decade – when political violence was more often committed by left-wing radicals who targeted government buildings to make statements – the rising wave of violence since 2016 often targets people, and mainly comes from the Right.

Bluebird, Bluebird went on to sweep three major writing prizes in America and the UK: the Edgar and Anthony Awards for Best Novel, and the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. As a black woman who grew up in the aftermath of the Civil Rights era, and the daughter of activists, Locke has witnessed plenty of violence and racism.

But until Trump’s election in 2016, she’d always felt America had mostly been on a positive trajectory; that the “arc of the moral universe”, as Martin Luther King Jr memorably put it, “was long, but it bends towards justice”.

She leaned into the confusion and betrayal she felt with her 2019 follow-up to Bluebird, Bluebird, called Heaven, My Home, where Mathews investigates a new wave of racial violence in the wake of the 2016 election, while also trying to save the missing son of an Aryan Brotherhood leader. Readers then had to wait five years for what Locke says will now be the final book in her Highway 59 series, which she is currently developing for the screen with her actor and screenwriter sister Tembi Locke.

The duo previously adapted Tembi’s memoir into the Netflix drama From Scratch. “My sister and I wrote the pilot. I’m very happy with it, and looking forward to the network’s feedback,” says Locke.

“But my industry is very weird right now. My story also asks for people to sit in a very particular kind of place and energy, which makes it timely, but also means people may be afraid of it.” Locke isn’t sure how bold the corporations who run the screen industry want to be, or what the viewers appetite may be for stories like hers which touch on tough US realities.

“Do people just want to be on TikTok? I don’t say that pejoratively, because I want to just be on TikTok half the time too, so I get it. We’re all just trying to figure it out.”

Locke was working as a writer-producer on Empire when she wrote Bluebird, Bluebird, and says her increasingly busy TV schedule played a part in the hiatus between the second and third Darren Mathews novels. But it wasn’t the only factor, she explains.

“Five years, so much has happened. There were a couple of impeachments, there was an insurrection, there was a pandemic, there was George Floyd.

“There were so many mass shootings in America – my brain just kind of scrambled to write about a police officer armed with a gun and a badge who is bending the law for his own ends.”

Even though Locke understood Mathews’s morality, how he put justice ahead of procedure, she realised he was “kind of doing the same thing Trump is doing, which is lying and bending laws to his own ends”.

Mathews would have to come to a reckoning.Locke had previously intended to write several novels in her Highway 59 series, with Mathews investigating crimes in different towns along the route to the Mexican border. As much as character is important to Locke, the series was sparked by its setting.

“I was writing on Empire when I had this overwhelming feeling of deeply missing Texas. So I didn’t start the series with Darren in mind, but a sense of place,” she tells me. “I started with Highway 59 itself, which runs north-south through eastern Texas. My entire family on both sides, going back to slavery, come from towns along this highway.”

Locke says she wanted to celebrate the multiplicity of Texas, its mix of varying ecology and cultures, its beauty and ugliness. “I think when people think of Texas or the Marlboro Man and all this, they’re thinking of a white dude in the hat. I wanted to write down what I know to be true, about black people in Texas who love the state, who are cowboys, who listen to blues and country.”

But Locke realised during Covid lockdowns that she needed to close things out. She didn’t want to be writing the series, or about “the Trump era”, for the next 20 years. Guide Me Home brilliantly brings Darren Mathews’s story to a close, on the page at least, as the bourbon-soaked sleuth is confronted not only by the mystery of a missing girl everyone seems to insist is OK, but revelations about himself and his family history.

“I feel like one of the gifts Darren Mathews has given me in these books and I hope they’ve given readers, is a way to process all we’ve been going through,” adds Locke. “One of the hallmarks of this period we’ve been living in, certainly for Americans, is the chaos of it all, the constant barrage of lines being crossed. It’s been weird and chaotic.”

• Guide Me Home by Attica Locke (Viper, £8.99) is out now. Attica Locke will be appearing at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival next week. Visit harrogateinternationalfestivals.com for tickets and information