When filming his TV series Race Relations, John Safran spent an uneasy couple of days with one of Mississippi’s most notorious white supremacisst. A year later, he heard that the man had been murdered – and what was more, the killer was black.

At first the murder seemd a twist on the old Deep South race crimes. But then more news rolled in. Maybe it was a dispute over money, or most intriguingly, over sex. Could the infamous racist actually have been secretly gay, with a thing for black men? Did Safran have the last footage of him alive? Could this be the story of a lifetime? Seizing his Truman Capote moment, he jumped on a plane to cover the trial.

Over six months, Safran got deeper and deeper into the South, becoming entwined in the lives of those connected with the murder – white separatists, black campaigners, lawyers, investigators, neighbours, even the killer himself. And the more he talked with them, the less simple the crime, and the world, seemed.

I thank Random House for putting this in my loot at the National Book Bloggers Forum, you can breathe easily now as it’s the last one I’ll review.

John Safran is well known for being brash, out there and doing things to get attention, he first came to everyone’s attention (apart from his family and friends) by appearing on Race Around the World running through the streets of Jerusalem wearing only a beanie and scarf from his favourite football team, St Kilda. Since then he’s made quite a reputation for himself for doing other strange stunts like this.

I was quite happy to read this book to see what his skills are really like, I finished it quite bemused and sometimes even amused. Safran is persistent, he knocks on doors, makes lots of phone calls and must have spent a mint on the murderer without ever actually speaking to him face-to-face. I suppose you’d have to be persistent to be a journalist, not that he is qualified as one but he mentions being a journalist several times.

What really troubles me about this book is that we learn much more about Safran than we do about the murderer, crime and deceased. Bear in mind we learn more about all three of those than we would from newspapers but not from internet sources, if you search Wikipedia for the deceased (Richard Barrett) you find a link at the bottom to his FBI files which could make fascinating reading. Safran refers to these FBI files on a few occasions. It’s meant to be a true crime book but there’s so much of Safran in it, we find out what he likes to eat, that he’s a dreadful housekeeper and he seems to be quite proud of these things, displaying them to us as he would display his fine china.

This is my first true crime book, I did expect to see far less of Safran and his investigations and more information about the crime, the murderer and the deceased. There is a lot of background in here, we get background to both the deceased and the murderer as well as learning quite a lot about the Deep South which is a white supremacist area.