Assumption

Percival Everett's genre-bending crime novel, Assumption, plunges apathetic Deputy Sheriff Ogden Walker into a trio of unrelated murders. The first case has Walker linking a stack of dead bodies found at a campsite in New Mexico with the mysterious death of the bigoted, yet seemingly innocuous Emma Bickers, who is discovered strangled to death under a trapdoor in her living room. Both of these crimes lead Walker to a showdown with an unyielding white supremacist organization. Then there's Caitlin Alison, who is looking for her missing cousin, whose case takes Walker from New Mexico to Colorado where he clashes with yurt-dwelling drug addicts camping in the mountains. Finally, Walker fears he's simply imagining key facts surrounding the case of Terry Lowell, a Fish and Game officer, who turns up dead shortly after Walker assists him with an arrest of a fish poacher. Written in lean, muscular prose, the book charges through each case to the final pages, where a chilling twist not only unveils a sublime revelation, but elevates the concerns of the book from those of standard crime fiction to a philosophical quandary regarding the nature of truth and identity in the face of good and evil. With Assumption, Everett subverts a genre to create something utterly new, engrossing, and haunting.