Crystal Trees

Percival Everett's The Trees is a must-listen that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.

There came an elastic aftershock of creaks and groans and then, softly softly, a chinking shower of rubbled cement. Leaves calmed and trunks stood serene. Where, not a minute before, there had been a suburb, there was now only woodland standing amid ruins. There is no warning. No chance to prepare. They arrive in the night: thundering up through the ground, transforming streets and towns into shadowy forest. Buildings are destroyed.

Something is buried beneath the watcher tree in the woods—a metal box with treasure inside. But what kind of treasure? Gold? Secrets? Memories? And who buried the box at the base of the spookiest tree in Stony Brooke? The tree with a reputation for snatching children and gobbling them up. Jordan and Holly discover the box on one of their adventures and crack it open to find unusual objects inside.