In Death of an Overseer, Michael Wayne, author of The Reshaping of Plantation Society, presents the bizarre and still unsolved murder of Duncan Skinner, overseer of Cedar Grove plantation in Natchez. He tells the story from the evidence in surviving documents, then allows readers to come to their own conclusions, reminding them in the words of his college mentor that "interpreting the past is basically an exercise in common sense." He invites visitors to his Web site to exchange ideas about the murder, and he hopes that descendants may have relevant additional information about the case.

From Oxford University Press, $35 hardback or $16.95 paper.

Novelist Richard Wright fled the United States in 1946 to live as an expatriate in Paris, where he became interested in the rise of the Pan-Africanist movement to decolonize Africa. His visits to emerging African nations during the 1950s produced four volumes of travel narratives, which are explored critically in Richard Wright's Travel Writings: New Reflections, edited by Virginia Whatley Smith. Scholars demonstrate how Wright's narratives profoundly influenced such later genres as postcolonial literature, contemporary travel writing, and resistance literature.

From University Press of Mississippi, $40.

In Eyes on Mississippi: A Fifty-Year Chronicle of Change, columnist Bill Minor of Jackson offers a sampling of the best of an estimated 5,000 pieces he has written since his first Mississippi assignment, the August 1947 funeral of U. S. senator Theodore G. Bilbo. The book is edited and published by Joanne Prichard Morris.

Copies are available at $20 each.

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