While browsing the true crime offerings in the Sony e-book store, I discovered an Oxford University Press publication titled Death of an Overseer. The synopsis described it as a cultural and sociological re-interpretation of an 1857 murder in Adams County, Mississippi. I enjoy crime books that aren't limited to a basic narrative so I bought it, despite its unusually high price for an e-book.
In May 1857 the battered corpse of Duncan Skinner, an overseer on a plantation owned by wealthy widow C...