The woman refuses to speak about what happened to her or why she was in the water, a fact which both Bernie and Porter attribute to their blackness. Porter jumps into the murky waters, and comes back onto the barge with a damp but otherwise unharmed white woman in his arms. During this floating excursion, the couple is startled by the sound of a gunshot, a woman's scream, and then a splash as if someone had fallen into the water. Despite a lack of money, Porter wants to give his wife a memorable birthday gift, so he finds a friend who can rent him a barge, and they go out on the bayou to look at the stars and float around at dusk. His wife Bernie is pregnant, and his law firm, which relies primarily on small injury claims and other civil court cases to get by, has dried up. The novel opens on Jay Porter, who is struggling with money.

The first story tells of Porter's narrowly avoided prison sentence at 19 for his radical work as a Black Panther the second reveals a long-dead romance with Houston mayor Cynthia Maddox whom Porter meets again when he is representing a sex worker in a case against an oil tycoon, and the third is a strange murder case involving a woman who jumps on a barge Porter rents with his wife, and who may or may not be covering up an elaborate conspiracy.

The book has three concurrent story lines, all of which feed into the drama of events as they unfold. Black Water Rising is a crime thriller by Attica Locke about a black lawyer named Jay Porter who lives and works on the Texas bayou in 1981, just after Reagan sets up shop in the White House.

Pleasantville by attica locke