Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter – Tom Franklin

In the late 1970s, in rural Mississippi, two boys form an unlikely friendship. Larry Ott is the shy, bookish son of a white mechanic, and Silas Jones is the son of a poor Black single mother. Despite the racial divisions of their community, they become close friends, until a teenage girl Larry takes on a date disappears and is never found. Larry is never charged, but the town is convinced he is guilty, and he lives as an outcast for the next twenty-five years.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, by Tom Franklin, picks up the story decades later. Silas, who left town after high school and became a baseball player, has returned as the town constable of Chabot, Mississippi. Larry still runs his late father’s auto repair shop, though he has almost no customers, and lives alone, shunned by everyone.

When another girl goes missing, suspicion immediately falls on Larry once again. Then Larry is shot and left for dead, and Silas is forced to confront the past he has tried to forget, including secrets about his own connection to Larry and to the events of years ago.

Franklin combines a gripping mystery with a moving story of friendship, race, class, guilt and redemption, set against the vividly described landscape of the rural South. The title refers to the way children in the South learn to spell the name of their state.

Atmospheric and emotionally powerful, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger and is a rewarding read for fans of literary crime fiction and Southern fiction. It contains violence and mature themes.