The Trees

When hog thief Junior Junior Milam is found brutally murdered, the police of Money, Mississippi, are stumped. When his cousin is found dead in the same gruesome fashion, it’s time for the MBI—the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation—to step in. Special detectives Ed and Jim expect resistance from the local sheriff, the coroner and a string of racist White townsfolk. What they don’t expect is an inexplicable mystery: at each crime scene a second dead body was found—that of the same Black man. A man who looks eerily familiar. As similar murders are reported from Illinois to California, the detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried. Provocative, fast-paced and morbidly funny, The Trees is an urgent novel of lasting importance, from an author with a finger on America’s pulse. Percival Everett is the author of more than thirty books. His novel Telephone was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and he received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Awards. He teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles. ‘Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knockout comedy.’ New York Times Book Review ‘[The Trees] blends Everett’s wit with elegy and solemnity.’ Boston Globe ‘With a highwire combination of whodunnit, horror, humor and razor-blade-sharp insight, The Trees is a fitting tribute of a novel: hard to put down and impossible to forget.’ NPR