In 2009 John Safran, a controversial Australian journalist, spent an uneasy few days interviewing one of Mississippi''s most notorious white supremacists. A year later, he hears that the man has been murdered by a young black man. But this is far from a straightforward race killing.

Safran flies back to Mississippi in a bid to discover what really happened, immersing himself in a world of clashing white separatists, black lawyers, police investigators, oddball neighbours and the killer himself. In the end, he discovers just how profoundly complex the truth about someone''s life - and death - can be.

A brilliantly innovative true-crime story. Safran paints an engrossing and revealing portrait of race, money, sex and power in the modern American South.

''John Safran''s captivating inquiry into a murder in darkest Mississippi is by turns informative, frightening and hilarious'' - John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil