Since the recession is still in full swing, most people are opting out of expensive summer vacations. Heat up your "staycation'' with a good crime thriller. 'Black Water Rising' is an electrifying debut novel by Attica Locke, a film and television writer.

It is about Jay Porter, a strip mall lawyer and former civil rights activist, whose career has not turned out exactly as well as he had hoped. Instead, he has seen about about as much trouble as any prisoner. But he is resigned to his plight and settles in Houston, Texas, for a fresh start in the 1980s. Still, if you're marked for trouble, it can find you. It's just the way it finds you that is troubling. Porter thought he was doing a good deed when he saved a drowning woman's life. Turns out, the deed was drenched in trouble.

'Black Water Rising' is a fast-paced thriller that will leave you guessing to the very end. She expertly presents a portrait of a deeply conflicted man, who fights for justice in spite of himself. Locke, currently working on an HBO miniseries about the civil rights movement, answered a few questions via email for BV Bookshelf:

What a breathtaking story. How did you come up with the idea?
The opening chapter is based on an event that happened to my family years ago. When I was 10 or 11 years old, my father threw a birthday party for my stepmother on a boat on Buffalo Bayou in Houston, Texas. He didn't have a lot of money at the time, and it was the best he could do. We brought our own food, our own coolers of beer and soda and a boom box – and it was a party! But when we got out on the water, we heard a woman somewhere in the brush along the bayou... she was crying for help. And then we heard gunshots. There was a debate on the boat about what to do. It was so dark on the water we couldn't even really tell where the voice was coming from. In the end, my father made the decision that he had to protect his family – his wife and child and the other children on the boat – first. We called the police. The book takes that incident as a jumping off point. What would have happened if we had stopped that boat?

How long did it take you to write it? It's 448 pages!
I played around with that first chapter for a long time, but when I finally set my mind to write the book, I took a second mortgage out on my house and on it worked full-time. I wrote the first draft in like 10 months. Then, I came back to it between other jobs to refine and cut it (the first draft was over 600 pages!).

How did you develop the characters, call girls, murderers, oil magnates and corporate powerbrokers? They are something to behold!
You know a lot of the characters came to my mind fully formed. The research about the oil industry was the most challenging part of the writing process.

The protagonist, Jay, is certainly a complex character. He must have taken a lot of time to develop. Based on anyone you know?
Jay, in some ways, is like my father in that they were both political activists in the late 60s and early 70s, and they both went on to become lawyers. In many ways, Jay is a tribute to the men and women of my parents' generation, and those who came before, men and women who endured a lot of heartache so that I could stand where I stand today. I owe them everything. But in another way, Jay is really like me. He is trying to make a psychological transition from a segregated America into an integrated America, and I was born in that transition, in that tension. I think this book could only have been written by someone of my generation.

This is a true thriller. Who are your role models?
James Ellroy, George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, but also Larry Brown, Pete Dexter, Toni Morrison, J. California Cooper and so many more.

Houston, Texas isn't exactly where you expect to find murder and intrigue.
Well, Houston in 1981 was a really interesting city. It was flush with oil money (this was two years before the bust), and the city was getting international attention. It seemed to really represent the conspicuous consumption of the early Reagan era. And the city had its first woman mayor. It was a city trying to transition out of the ugly South.

OK. I have to ask about your name. What's the story behind it?
I was named after the uprising at Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York in 1971. I was actually born three years later, but my mother was so moved by the events that took place at Attica – inmates standing up for the basic human rights – that she says the name just came to her the second I was born. I've come to deeply appreciate it as a reminder that it's OK to say "no" sometimes – to stand up for what I believe in.

Finally, what are you working on next?
I have started a second novel... another murder mystery.