Review of "The Trees: A Novel" by Percival Everett

What would happen if the 'spirits' of people who'd been horribly mistreated in the past - beaten, tortured, lynched, shot, etc. - came back to get revenge. That's the theme of this satire, which is both hilarious and disturbing.

The current trouble starts in Money, Mississippi, which has a notorious past. In 1955, a 14-year-old Black youth called Emmett Till was murdered in Money after he allegedly 'offended' a white woman called Carolyn Bryant. For this misdeed, Carolyn's husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam viciously beat, mutilated, and shot Emmett, then threw him in the Tallahatchie River. Bryant and Milam were found 'not guilty' by an all white jury.




Emmett Till


Bryant's Grocery Store where Emmett Till allegedly spoke to Caroline Bryant

Money, Mississippi hasn't changed much since those Jim Crow days, and in the 21st century it's still full of poorly educated, racist bumpkins who casually (and constantly) use the n-word to refer to Black people.

The bigoted hayseeds - and everyone else in Money - are shocked when Junior Junior Milam (the son of J.W. Milam), who raises hogs, is found murdered in his back room.



Junior Junior has a bloody bashed-in skull; a length of rusty barbed wire is wrapped around his neck several times; and one of his eyes is gouged out. Ten feet from Junior Junior is the VERY dead body of a viciously beaten Black man in a blue suit.



When law enforcement officers arrive to survey the scene, Deputy Sheriff Braden Brady eyes Junior Junior and observes, "Lord, Lordy, Lord, Lord, Jesus. Looky at that. His balls ain't on him! I think they're in the n---'s hand."



Deputy Delroy Digby agrees and says, "Don't touch nothing. Don't touch a gawddamn thing. We got ourselves some kind of crime here. Lordy."



Sheriff Red Jetty arrives at the scene and sends the bodies to the coroner, a quack called Doctor Reverend Cad Fondle.



Soon afterwards, Fondle calls the sheriff and says, "We got us a problem. Somebody done stole that n----'s body."



The Black man's body reappears, however, when Wheat Bryant (the son of Roy Bryant), who has no job and does nothing, is found in his bathroom.



Wheat is dead and bloody, with barbed wire around his neck just like Junior Junior. Nearby is the 'missing' Black corpse, holding Wheat's testicles in his fist.



Wouldn't you know it, the dead Black man vanishes from the morgue once again, only to reappear at the death scene of old infirm Carolyn Bryant (the woman who accused Emmett Till), who's (seemingly) been frightened to death.

Law enforcement officials in Money are clearly out of their depth, and the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation (MBI) sends two agents to investigate the crimes - Special Detectives Jim Davis and Ed Morgan, both of whom are Black.





Hearing the MBI is on its way, Sheriff Jetty grouses, "Well, that's just f--- dandy. City cops coming up here to the sticks to help the hillbillies. Don't worry. I'll be nice to the sumbitches."

As it turns out, the corpse of the 'roaming Black man' can't be identified, but he seems to have an uncanny resemblance to Emmett Till.

Before long, these 'revenge' crimes spread around the country. Racists and Ku Klux Klansmen are found dead in Illinois, Minnesota, Wyoming, and California, and in each case there's an unidentified minority corpse nearby, clutching the victim's severed testicles.

MBI Special Detectives Jim Davis and Ed Morgan are joined by FBI Special Agent Herberta Hind, who also happens to be Black.



Jim, Ed, and Herberta determine that Money, Mississippi is the nexus of the crime wave, and they suspect that 105-year-old Mama Z, an African-American root doctor, is involved somehow.



Mama Z has a record of every person lynched in the United States since 1913, when her father - a voting rights activist - was strung up. Mama Z's files stretch to the thousands, and include men, women, children, and Asians. Speaking to a professor who's studying her files, Mama Z observes, "Less than one percent of lynchers were ever convicted of a crime. Only a fraction of those ever served a sentence."

Mama Z's furious great-granddaughter Gertrude observes, "Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices. Where there are no mass graves, no one notices. American outrage is always for show. It has a shelf life."



As the story reaches it's climax, and the crime wave continues to escalate, it appears the outrage has taken on a life of its own.



All this sounds grim, but the book is hilariously funny.

Many of the laughs come from the novel's farcical characters. For example, Wheat Bryant's wife Charlene is called Hot Mama Yeller (her CB handle), even by her children. When little Wheat Jr. needs to use the toilet, he whines, "Hot Mamma Yeller, I gots to pee real bad."



And at one of the murder scenes, Doctor Reverend Cad Fondle falls to his knees and prays, "Oh, Gawd Jesus, I knows you have a plan, but us poor White mortals is scared to death down here with this strange n---- you keep sending. Is he an omen, oh Lawd, a sign, or is he the devil, and should we dismember him and burn his body right away?"

Deputies Digby and Brady also generate some laughs. Faced with a flat tire on their patrol car, the deputies stand looking at the tire, scratching each other's heads. At first they scratched their own heads, but that told them nothing. But as soon as Brady scratched Digby's head, Digby said, 'Maybe we had oughta change that tire'."



More laughs come from observing White bigots around Black detectives. The rednecks can't help starting to say n-----. Then they look up and change their tunes pronto.



Author Percival Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California whose books are often satirical, meant to explore race and identity issues in America. Everett certainly highlights such issues in this compelling and timely book.

I was appalled by the history that underlies the book, but very entertained by the narrative. My one quibble would be the incompletely resolved ending, because I wanted to know more. Still, I'd highly recommend the novel.

 Rating: 4.5 stars

Review of "Thunder Bay: A Cork O'Connor Mystery" by William Kent Krueger

 

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In this 7th book in the Cork O'Connor series, the former sheriff travels to Canada to fulfill a promise to his friend Henry Meloux, whose story forms the core of this novel. The book can be read as a standalone, but familiarity with the characters is a bonus.



*****

Corcoran (Cork) O'Connor, whose ancestry is Irish and Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) Indian, was the sheriff of Aurora, Minnesota for nearly a decade. Cork now runs a hamburger shack, and recently got his private investigator license, to keep busy and generate extra income for his college-bound children.



Cork lost his parents young, but nonagenarian Henry Meloux, an Ojibwe Medicine Man (healer and spiritualist), has been a friend/father figure to Cork for decades. So when Henry is hospitalized, and possibly dying, Cork can't deny the old man's request.



Henry tells Cork he has 'a sadness, too heavy for his heart', and reveals he fathered a son 73 years ago - a child he's only seen in visions. Henry wants to meet his offspring , and asks Cork to find the man and bring him to Minnesota. Henry gives Cork all the information he has: the boy's mother was named Maria Luna; she came from Canada; and her photo is in a pocketwatch in Henry's cabin.



Cork does some internet research and learns that Maria Luna is deceased, but her septuagenarian son, Henry Wellington, lives in Thunder Bay, Canada. Henry Wellington is the scion of a VERY WEALTHY gold-mining family, but he's an eccentric recluse (along the lines of Howard Hughes) who's hidden himself away from society.



Cork travels to Thunder Bay and manages to meet Henry Wellington, who refuses to believe his father is an 'Indian buck', and has no interest in meeting Meloux. Cork's visit seems to alarm someone, however, because an assassin subsequently tries to shoot Meloux - who's out of the hospital and back in his cabin.



Meloux now feels compelled to go to Canada to 'heal' his reclusive son, and he wants Cork to take him to Thunder Bay. Before they go, Meloux tells Cork the story of his early years, which takes up a large portion of the novel.

In a nutshell, adolescent Henry Meloux was ripped away from his family in Aurora and sent to a boarding school that functioned to inculcate 'white culture' into Indian children.



Henry ran away from the school and returned to Aurora, where he lived with his Uncle Woodrow, who taught Henry to hunt, fish, track, and live off the land.



At that time, white adventurers would hire Indian guides to take them into the wilderness. At one point young Henry was hired by two gold hunters named Luna and Wellington, who wanted to explore southern Canada. Luna brought his beautiful daughter Maria and nature took its course. Henry and Maria's romance - added to the hunters' ambition and greed - engendered tragedy, and Henry never saw Maria again. Still, Henry's visions informed him about his son. (Henry's entire tale is compelling, so you should read the book.)







Even though Henry Meloux is now in his late nineties, he's determined to go to Thunder Bay to help his son. So Meloux, Cork, and Cork's friend Wally Schanno (a former sheriff) head for Canada to make the meeting happen. This results in danger, action, and adventure......all hallmarks of Cork O'Connor books.



In a side plot, Cork is involved in a personal family drama. Cork and his wife Jo are concerned about their daughter Jenny, a recent high school graduate who's been dating a boy named Sean for years. Jenny and Sean, both aspiring writers, must make some decisions about their future, and Cork and Jo fear Jenny will make a wrong choice.



For me, this is an especially good Cork O'Connor book. Highly recommended to fans of the series and readers who like action/suspense stories.

Rating: 4 stars

Review of "Have You Seen Me?" A Novel of Suspense by Kate White

One morning personal finance journalist Ally Linden arrives at Greenbacks, the company she works for, to get a big surprise.

Damien Howe, Greenbacks' owner (and Ally's one-time flame) is bewildered, and tells Ally she hasn't worked at Greenbacks for the past five years.



Ally is taken to the hospital, where she's seen by a psychiatrist. Ally slowly recalls that she now works as a freelance personal finance expert - writing a monthly column, giving talks, and hosting a weekly podcast.



Ally also recalls she's married to a successful lawyer called Hugh;



she lives in a luxury apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side;



she has a best friend named Gabby; and more.



However, Ally CAN'T REMEMBER what she did for the past few days.

The hospital psychiatrist determines that Abby experienced a dissociative fugue state that caused her to lose her recent memories. The doctor also says Ally might experience more such dissociative states in the future.



When Ally's husband Hugh takes her home from the hospital, he admits Ally hasn't been home for the past couple of days. Hugh says he wasn't alarmed because he and Ally had been arguing about having children, and he thought Ally was taking time to cool off. Hugh suggests the argument about kids might have caused Ally's dissociative state, and it does seem like a possible trigger.



To try to avoid future episodes of memory loss, Ally delves into her past with the therapist she's been seeing for some time.



Ally recalls a traumatic episode at the age of nine, when she took a shortcut home from school and found the body of a dead child. Over the following days, Ally remembers more and more about this incident, which she's been suppressing for most of her life.



Besides wanting to figure out what caused the fugue state, Ally wants to know what she did for the past 48 hours or so. The presence of blood-stained tissues in Ally's pocket lead her to think someone may have been hurt (or worse), and she wants to know where she's been sleeping and eating and things like that.

So Ally hires a private detective to look into her recent whereabouts. The PI turns up some interesting information, and Ally slowly starts to put things together.



Then things then take an unexpected turn, and that's all I can say without spoilers.

For a (supposedly) savvy woman, Ally is a bit naive about some of the people around her. Ally eventually wises up, though, and the novel's denouement is surprising in some ways, and predictable in others.

This is an engaging story, not too deep, but a decent read for suspense fans.



I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Cynthia Farrell, who does a fine job.

Rating: 3 stars

Review of "Busybodies: There’s a Mystery Around Every Corner" by Elle Cosimano, Jesse Q. Sutanto, Emma Rosenblum, Nita Prose, Kellye Garrett, and Alicia Thomson

 

This compilation of six novellas by six mystery writers highlights the 'amateur sleuth.' The introduction to the collection reads: "Every nosy neighbor, gossipy friend, and meddling relative is just one good mystery away from becoming a detective. From behind locked doors or out in broad daylight, driven by chance or curiosity, amateur sleuths get in over their heads in these six hair-raising hilarious stories."

I"ll give a brief description of each novella.

*****



Staged by Elle Cosimano

Struggling real estate agent Lyda and her friend Dani are staging a neglected Victorian house that Lyda's desperate to sell. The century old disaster has a sagging front porch, crooked walls, and dusty foul-smelling carpets.



To spruce the property up, Lyda has hired handsome gardener Sawyer Mackenzie, who's outside showing off his sun-kissed hair, tight jeans, and toned chest. Sawyer, a lothario known for 'loving and leaving 'em', has broken a few hearts around town.



Lyda and Dani go off to purchase some things for the staging and return to find Sawyer dead in the house. The gardener is sprawled on the bedroom floor, with his clothes scattered around, and a giant purple hickey on the side of his neck.

When the authorities can't nab the the killer Lyda steps up to save the day.

*****



The Reunion Dinner by Jesse Q. Sutanto

Josephine Ying is very excited to be hosting her extended family's Chinese New Year dinner for the very first time.



Josephine's husband suggests she's gone overboard with the roasted whole pig, but Josephine retorts, "Everyone traveling from all over the country to come to dinner." This includes the couple's son Keith, who works on Wall Street and says he's bringing a 'fabulous surprise.'

Josephine pictures a necklace or bracelet from Tiffany's, or perhaps an expensive handbag. But when Keith arrives....VERY LATE....he says "Ma, Ba, remember how I said I had a surprise? Well, I'd like you to meet Lacey, my fiancée." Josephine is gobsmacked, as are other family members, some of whom already know and hate Lacey.



During the dinner Lacey drops dead: "Her eyes were open, staring glassily at nothing. There was foam at the corners of her mouth." Josephine is fearful her son Keith will be accused of murder, so she uncovers the killer herself.

*****



Crime of Fashion by Emma Rosenblum

Meticulous Nellie Otis is an assistant at the fashion magazine 'Elle', for which she "maintained, with precision, a systematically structured fashion closet that housed designer clothing and accessories." Nothing in Nellie's purview has ever gone missing.....until now!



A three-million dollar Bulgari necklace has disappeared from a fashion shoot. The necklace was on a designated jewelry table, with Nellie and an armed security guard beside it. When Nellie went to fetch a soda for the cover model, the guard apparently fell asleep, and the necklace vanished.



If the Bulgari isn't found, heads will roll, specifically Nellie's head - ESPECIALLY because editor-in-chief Charlotte is blaming Nellie for the theft.

To save her job Nellie makes it her business to catch the culprit.

*****



The Nosy Neighbor by Nita Prose

Septuagenarian Marge has known her across-the-street neighbor Doris for fifty years. According to Marge, Doris is a busybody with her nose up in everyone else's business. Marge isn't the one to talk, however, because she stares out the window at Doris and her husband Bob all day.



According to Marge, Doris is a jumped up floozy, but Bob is "slowing down, sicker than usual, wheezy and unsteady on his feet."

Marge is surprised when Doris comes over one day and announces, "I've booked Bob and me a special long weekend in Spain. We'll be studying flamenco.....[and] you never know, one of us might like it so much, we may never come back!" Doris asks Marge to look after the house while she and Bob are gone, and to be sure to water the newly planted hydrangeas in the backyard.



Marge can't resist the opportunity to snoop around Doris's house, and for various reasons, Marge suspects Doris killed Bob. Marge tries to prove Doris is a murderer....which leads to a surprising finale.

*****



One Lucky Subscriber by Kellye Garrett

Internet sensation Kidd - who does outsize stunts - is staging an event at the American Dream Mall, which has three million square feet, one-hundred-plus stores, five floors, two mini-golf courses, and one indoor theme park.



Ten contestants, flown in from all over the United States, are vying to win $50,000. The idea is that the players are given a head start to hide in the mall, each one carrying a case with fifty grand. Kidd announces, "I'll be spending the next eight hours playing the world's largest game of hide-and-seek. The [contestants] can hide anywhere they want. I find them. The money's mine." On the other hand, anyone who isn't found within the eight hours gets to keep the money.



Kidd's team will film him during the search, and Kidd expects the video to make a big splash online.

Contestant #4 teams up with contestant #2, and they find (what they think is) an excellent hiding place. The game proceeds, and after some hours Kidd has located several players and is approaching the hiding place of players 4 and 2.

Around this time there's a big kerfuffle and Kidd is injured. Kidd insists, "Someone tried to kill me. We're trying to figure out who...." and he begins accusing everyone in sight.

This leads to surprising revelations, and a light bulb moment helps contestant #4 resolve the case.

*****



A Classic Case by Alicia Thompson

Audrey is a rather shy young woman who looks forward to Wednesdays.



Wednesday is the day Audrey goes to the 'Keep It Classic' video store to rent an old-timey film. It's also the day Audrey meets up with Mr. Hoffman, "the sweet eightysomething-year-old-man who came in at precisely two o'clock to renew his rental on his favorite movie, 'She Who Laughs Last', starring notoriously reclusive 1960s ingenue Katia Kelly."

There's another reason Audrey patronizes the video store. She has a HUGE crush on the owner, Grant, a nice-looking fellow who always wears jeans, a heather-gray T-shirt, and a soft plaid flannel. Grant is polite, but other than that, seems to take no notice of Audrey.



One Wednesday, Mr. Hoffman doesn't show up at 'Keep It Classic', much to Audrey's chagrin. Audrey tries to get Grant to 'investigate', but he shrugs off Mr. Hoffman's absence. Audrey decides to go to the elderly gent's house herself....and when Grant shows up as well, things take an unexpected turn.

This little mystery has fun elements and a not-so-surprising ending.

****

All the suspense stories are fun, but my two favorites, for their 'twists', are The Reunion Dinner and The Nosy Neighbor.

Thanks to Netgalley, the authors, and Amazon Original Stories for a copy of the book.

Rating: 4 stars