Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Percival Everett's new book, The Trees,

is a darkly funny detective novel that deals with race and violence in a really up-front sort of way.

In book reviewers speak, I can see someone calling it unflinching or raw or, you know, maybe harrowing.

But it's a little more coy than that. You can hear it all in this interview with Scott Simon

2. I mean, there's one part where Scott sets up a complex question that ends with him asking,

are you stereotyping white Southerners? And Percival just goes, yeah. It's a funny exchange that then turns into a frank discussion about fairness and justice that, well, you can just hear it for yourself.

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Special detectives Ed Morgan and Jim Davis are the big city heat from Hattiesburg.

They're with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation,

and they're in the small town of money to investigate the murder of two men,

in the back room of the same shotgun-style house. One, a white man is disfigured

in a way so gruesome. We can't tell you without a trigger warning, if you please. The other,

a black man, seems to just walk out of the morgue. The Trees is a novel by Percival Everett,

the author of more than 30 books and the recipient of a Guganai.

He joins us now from South Pasadena, California.

Thank you so much for being with us.

Thanks for having me.

The murders are gruesome in detail.

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