The Trees by Percival Everett
This novel is on the Booker shortlist for 2022 and I can see why. A Black comedy in every sense this tells the story of some mysterious murders centred on a town called Money, Mississippi. Masquerading as an offbeat, horrific (and very funny) police procedural/murder mystery, this is a fast moving story about a family of rednecks and then an ever widening circle of white victims being murdered, with the common denominator being a dead Black man at every scene. Using the real life lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 in the real Money, Mississippi this very quickly turns into an angry and sharp commentary on race in America today, with the caricatured rednecks as victims being a lot less real than the Black cops and suspects. The references to the dead waking, and a whole chapter being taken up with listing the names of Black men lynched in America, together with the shocking statistics of how few of these crimes were ever investigated, let alone sol...