Percival Everett's Novel 'The Trees' Parses Through Race's Part In A Southern Murder

'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 who's 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 Guggenheim. He joins Weekend Edition Saturday from South Pasadena, Calif.'