John Safran / Penguin

When John Safran’s Race Relations aired in 2009, a sequence featuring a prank on the prominent Mississippi white supremacist Richard Barrett was cut out of the show on legal advice. When Barrett was stabbed to death in his home by a young black man in 2010, Safran’s antennae lifted and he flew to Mississippi to make sense of the story: was it a race murder or something else altogether?

Safran gives an account of his months following up the story through interviews with those who mixed in Barrett’s circle, with journalists, police, lawyers, politicians black and white, with the family of Barrett’s killer Vincent McGee and, in an extraordinary series of telephone exchanges involving the payment of stored value Walmart Green Dot cards and an engagement ring, with McGee himself.

Safran follows his own unconventional instincts and is able to translate into prose his talent for extracting out of awkward situations something between entertainment and analysis. Yes, this is ‘a race war written by Charlie Kaufman’ but the fact is that Safran, as obsessive and as meta as he is, turns out to be a fairly good investigator; he is casually disarming, sometimes even opening wide the drawer that contains his own heart, in pursuit of something close to the complicated truth.