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In 2009 John Safran, a controversial Australian journalist, spent an uneasy few days interviewing one of Mississippi’s most notorious white supremacists. A year later, he hears that the man has been murdered by a young black man. But this is far from a straightforward race killing.
Safran flies back to Mississippi in a bid to discover what really happened, immersing himself in a world of clashing white separatists, black lawyers, police investigators, oddball neighbours and the killer himself. In the end, he discovers just how profoundly complex the truth about someone’s life – and death – can be.
A brilliantly innovative true-crime story. Safran paints an engrossing and revealing portrait of race, money, sex and power in the modern American South.
‘John Safran’s captivating inquiry into a murder in darkest Mississippi is by turns informative, frightening and hilarious’ – John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
Safran flies back to Mississippi in a bid to discover what really happened, immersing himself in a world of clashing white separatists, black lawyers, police investigators, oddball neighbours and the killer himself. In the end, he discovers just how profoundly complex the truth about someone’s life – and death – can be.
A brilliantly innovative true-crime story. Safran paints an engrossing and revealing portrait of race, money, sex and power in the modern American South.
‘John Safran’s captivating inquiry into a murder in darkest Mississippi is by turns informative, frightening and hilarious’ – John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
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Reviews
A winning combination of memoir, true crime and gonzo journalism . . . a compulsive summer read
Funny and gripping and wonderfully weird . . . It's a tremendous book. I can't praise it too highly
Witty, insightful, compelling - In Cold Blood for our generation
Mississippi is like a trampoline for [Safran's] eccentricities. But the form and content of the story bring out an unfamiliar side of him
A hilarious and bizarre story that leads where you least expect it. John Safran has for years been one of my favourite journalists - forever pushing the boundaries, funny, startling, a hurricane
The elegance of this book is that its axis is a resounding 'perhaps' . . . It is this moral ambivalence that draws readers to the true crime genre, and Safran nails it
Stunning
One of the best pieces of sustained, rigorous journalism I've read in twenty years. It is absolutely magnificent - smart, and wry, and emotional too
John Safran's captivating inquiry into a murder in darkest Mississippi is by turns informative, frightening and hilarious. It is enlivened by a swarm of creepy locals and a torrent of astonishing details--such as hedge clippers put to surgical use in the performance of an official autopsy
[Safran] has written a marvellous book which I cannot put down