Paris Trout

The time and place: Cotton Point, a small Georgia town, just after World War II. The event: the murder of a fourteen-year-old black girl by a white man named Paris Trout, who feels he's done absolutely nothing wrong.

With razor-sharp precision, Pete Dexter etches a picture of a brutal killing and its effects on this small Southern town. Just as an acid continues to bite farther and farther into a surface, so the act continues to eat away at the social fabric of the town, through its manners and civility, relentlessly exposing the personalities of its inhabitants: Paris Trout—dominating, intimidating, obsessed, in ever-widening circles.

Trout's perverse determination warps the sensibilities of those around him. Hanna Trout, his wife—timid, quiet, but with a stoic inner strength. Sexually abused, Hanna bears the brunt of her husband's festering paranoia. She tries to leave him...and almost succeeds. Harry Seagraves, Paris Trout's defense lawyer — pragmatic, hard, resolved to the inequities of life. Defending Trout haunts Seagraves and leads him finally to Hanna for help. Carl Bonner, Hanna's divorce lawyer—young, idealistic, self-righteous. Blind to reality, Bonner is incapable of seeing the terrible danger Paris Trout presents.

Hypnotically, with the deftest hand, Pete Dexter probes the mind of these fascinating characters, creating a story of disturbing power that hovers, indelibly suspended, in a time and place all its own.