Safran's book will make readers chuckle, fidget, and turn page after page wondering what will happen next as the author looks to find the truth about the murder of a white supremacist by a black man in the deep South. The dark humor in this real-life tale mostly comes from Safran, an Australian Jewish documentary filmmaker and comedian, who is a fish out of water as he navigates Jackson, MS. The writing is personal and blunt, as though the reader is peeking into the author's thoughts during his investigations. Safran often addresses other well-known true crime books such as Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. This work is similar in a way in that there is a culture clash between the author and the community where the murder happened, but Safran injects his perspective as a true outsider into a place that is friendly but soaked in history that contributes to the case. The author talks with the police, neighbors, white supremacists, and the killer as he digs into the truth, or many versions of it. VERDICT This true crime book will stick with readers. Safran does a great job of looking at the murder from multiple perspectives and brings in his own experience learning about the culture, which is in itself a character. For fans of true crime, Southern tales, and books similar to Capote's and John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. [See Prepub Alert, 6/2/14.]—Ryan Claringbole, Coll. Lib. at the Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison

After interviewing infamous white supremacist Richard Barrett in Mississippi for a film on race, Safran, a white Jewish Australian documentarian born in that state, learned that Barrett had been murdered by a young black man named Vincent McGee. He returned to investigate. As he shows here, the crime was a lot more complicated than what it first appeared to be: an inversion of the race crimes that dominated the Old South. The book promises to be an impassioned study of race, money, sex, and power, with a touch of humor.