American Ghost

In her fourth novel (after The Schooling of Claybird Catts), Owens takes on an ugly subject and largely succeeds with an engrossing story. Based on the last reported lynching in America, Owens relocates the history to a tiny Florida town, where, in 1938, Henry Kite, a black man, was lynched after shooting a Jewish storekeeper. Decades later, the storekeeper’s great-grandson, Sam, a graduate student in anthropology, arrives to investigate the lynching. Things get complicated when he falls for Jolie, a Pentecostal preacher’s daughter whose family are thought of as “inbred hillbillies.” In the town of Hendrix, everyone knows everything, and tongues wag over Jolie’s catching herself a “rich Jew.” Then, while hunting with her brothers, Sam is shot. As he recuperates, Jolie flees, believing he was only using her for the investigation. The two don’t meet again until a decade later when another investigator becomes interested in the lynching. A thwarted romance set against the backdrop of a town’s difficult history, this story showcases Owens’s talent for characterization and her ability to make settings come alive, but her choice to write dialogue in dialect sounds too much like something we’ve heard before. Agent: Marly Rusoff & Associates. (Oct.)