The Trees by Percival Everett

SEPTEMBER 2024 DOTTERS BOOK CLUB PICK From Graywolf Press: Winner of the 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Finalist for the 2022 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize Longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Percival Everett’s The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching i