A Killing in This Town Book

From an award-winning and critically acclaimed writer comes a searing novel about a small Mississippi town trapped in a cycle of racism and violence, and the two boys who heroically defy tradition and seek an end to the injustice. Olympia Vernon's third novel, A Killing in This Town, is a taut, poetic masterpiece that exhumes a horrific epoch from the annals of the American South. There is a menace in the woods of Bullock, Mississippi, and not only for the black man destined to be lynched when a white boy comes of age. The white men who work at the Pauer Plant are in danger, too, but they refuse to heed pastor Earl Thomas's urgent message that the factory is slowly killing them. It is only when Gill Mender — a man haunted by past sins — returns to town that change seems possible. A transfixing and pivotal work of fiction, A Killing in This Town exposes the fragile hierarchy of a society poisoned by hatred, and shows the power of an individual to stand up to the demons of history and bring the cycle of violence to an end.

The New York Times - Maud Casey

…, [Vernon] vividly lays out a collection of blasted lives.