February is African-American History month in the United States, and the Trans-Atlanticist is celebrating with a number of podcasts about African-American authors. For this first episode of NovelROMANtics, host Dr. Douglas Cowie and his guest, Dr. Oli Belas of University of Bedfordshire, discuss a pair of crime novels by Attica Locke: Blue Bird, Blue Bird and Heaven, My Home, both of which follow black Texas Ranger Darren Matthews as he tries to unravel the truth of a complicated set of white-supremacist hate crimes in rural East Texas.