THOSE WE THOUGHT WE KNEW

A pair of violent attacks reveal the racist history of a North Carolina town.

Joy’s new novel opens with a foreboding sentence: “The graves took all night to dig.” The graves in this case are part of an art project headed by a young Black woman named Toya Gardner, who is engaged in a series of works that revisit the town’s history of racism and intolerance. (Of a local college’s early-20th-century expansion, she says, “They bulldozed a Cherokee mound and razed a Black church. Those are the things that school chose to move.”) Nearby, Ernie Allison, a White sheriff’s deputy, finds William Dean Cawthorn, a man with a swastika tattoo, sleeping in the back of a car along with Klan robes, a gun, and a list of contacts that includes the local chief of police, the last of which soon goes missing. Tension builds and builds to two acts of violence directed at Toya and Ernie. In the aftermath, the aging Sheriff John Coggins and Toya’s grandmother Vess Jones move to the forefront of the novel, as does Leah Green, the detective handling the investigation. Joy emphasizes the setting here, immersing the reader in quotidian details and embracing the plot’s slow burn. It’s telling that snakes in a house are a recurring image—and much of the book centers around its White characters grappling with their culpability in racism both overt and passive. Or, as the head of a local church tells Green, “It shouldn’t take a Black life for you to have some moment of insight, some moment of clarity.” And the mystery at the novel’s heart plays out in an unexpected way, with Joy employing a deft touch to the plotting.

An emotionally complex procedural that goes to unexpected places.