The Trees

Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, this sharp and witty literary mystery explores America's painful legacy of lynching.

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.