Two members of the MBI—the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation—are called to a very unusual crime scene down in Money, MS. A man has been strangled with barbed wire, with greater force than a single person could muster, and counterpart to him, lays a dead black man. Both looks like they’ve gone through a heavy altercation and the black man is holding the testicles of the white man. Then, as the examiner goes to do an autopsy, the black man appears to have vanished. Things only get stranger from here.

This is one sneaky book. It moves from a fairly straight forward contemporary crime novel leaning into realism, but shifts gears as it goes. What you ought to know going in: This is not typical genre fiction. It’s no police procedural nor is it buddy cop, though the dialogue does sway that way from time to time. Best way I can explain so the reader doesn’t feel robbed of expectations is probably surrealistic crime with both dark humour and a heavy political overtones. It’s frenetically paced and the dialogue in particular is outstanding.

Racism is The subject of this book and it tackles it on many fronts and, in my opinion, to great effect. The surrealism is dialled up slowly. But what this book is About starts with a bang and doesn’t let up. The detectives are more than acclimated to dealing with the outright racist citizenry down in these parts and they get a big dose of it from everyone, all the time. The N-word is liberally applied.

Quickly, it becomes apparent that Everett is critiquing white supremacy directly in the portrayal of white folk here. They have no qualms and wouldn’t know what was morale if it struck them in the head. They’re incompetent, unrepentant, and hate is hereditary. In short, they exemplify what we’ve come to know about Nazis. Counter to the popular belief that they were exceptional and ran on Swiss time and were exceptional tacticians, and this is the case with all white supremacist organizations, yes, even the organized ones—there is generally an tremendous amount of incompetence in the rank and file, with few exceptions. When ideas and beliefs held by these organizations are interrogated, they fall apart. Hell, they invent pseudo science and misinformation to make themselves feel creditable, but it’s unsubstantiated hogwash. And Everett is having none of it from these people.

As more and more deaths occur, the surrealism goes up, and we begin to get the larger picture of these events.

A 105 year old black woman has been documenting every lynching that’s been happening. Bodies are disappearing. The victims seem to have ties to past hate crimes—not against black people, but seemingly every marginalized identity. It examines, by literalizing, the ingrained fear white people have about minorities, but also satirizes the supposed response of such a threat the alt-right presupposes will happen all of the time as a fear mongering tactic. If “race wars” did break out, what would that actually look like? What would spark such a thing?

By exposing and putting such fears under a stark light, they become both ugly and laughable at the same time. A tight rope dance the novel pulls off brilliantly, while also having an even more overt political statement waiting in the wings, and the surrealism reaches a fever pitch. Absolutely fantastic bit of writing. Only downside I had was expecting a straight forward gritty crime novel. What I got instead was well worth the zig-zag, though. As you can tell.