In 1948, Idella Thompson, an elderly widow from a prominent family in Leland, Miss., was gruesomely murdered — stabbed 150 times with a pair of pruning shears. Her daughter Ruth claimed to have encountered an unidentified Black intruder who had just killed Idella in her downstairs bathroom, but almost no one believed her. In fact, Ruth — a former debutante and mother of two who was described by family members as the “perfect daughter” — herself was tried and convicted of the killing. Yet even today, questions linger about what really happened.

Few stories are more fascinating that a grisly small-town crime where no one can agree on what transpired — or why — and which is solved, only to remain troubling many years later. Add matricide and an incendiary time period, and you have Beverly Lowry’s new book, “Deer Creek Drive: A Reckoning of Memory and Murder in the Mississippi Delta.”

Lowry has a special connection to her subject: She grew up in a town near Leland, and though only 10 when the killing took place, it made such an impression on her that 70 years later, she writes, memories “still refuse to let go.” A novelist who has written two other true-crime books, Lowry finally returns to Mississippi to report not just the details of the case but also the environment in which it unfolded. At the same time, she twines her own troubled family history throughout the story. Although the relevance of this parallel narrative is not always clear, Lowry’s granular re-creation of that time and place captures its sensibility.

Even the geology of the Mississippi Delta is suggestive, a humid, fertile flatland that is not a delta at all but “a fat, juicy flood plain of mostly buckshot dirt,” which gave rise to “white gold,” as cotton was once called, apparently without irony. Lowry’s courtroom descriptions are particularly evocative, as she describes the rigorously enforced segregated seating, the sluggish ceiling fans, the spectators who arrive with “picnic baskets packed with fried chicken or egg salad sandwiches” to watch jury selection. Meanwhile, local newspapers report Ruth’s courthouse outfits in detail, and cover cotillions and debutante balls just as assiduously as the trial.

By convening the customs and biases of the period as she reinvestigates this crime and its aftermath, Lowry does her best to provide a “reckoning” — as her title promises — with life in the Mississippi Delta in the 1950s. Her forensic look at that period certainly shows that pervasive racism as well as less frankly acknowledged homophobia surrounded the case. When Ruth Dickins stands trial for murder, she has few supporters. Instead, the townspeople seem eager to condemn her, one of the many strands of this tangled story that Lowry tries to tease out. Was it her “mannish” short hairstyle, her friendships with younger women and her flouting of “the southern lady’s book of rules and behavior” that turned so many people against Ruth? All these years later, people in Leland still don’t want to talk about it.

What is clear is that the investigation was very much muddied: Idella and Ruth seem to be related to half the people in town, including the doctor who examines the body, the sheriff who allows the bloody floor to be mopped before it can be photographed, and the police chief who permits Ruth to go to the hospital before she’s questioned, and change her clothes, which are then washed. Plus, someone wiped those shears clean.

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Perhaps the book’s greatest surprise is that despite such a peculiarly botched investigation, the justice system more or less worked. Ruth’s attempts to pin the blame on an unknown Black man failed, as did most of her wealthy husband’s efforts pull political strings on her behalf after she’s sent to the state penitentiary. And yet, was justice served? Lowry feels that Ruth’s first-degree murder sentence was suspect, given the particulars of the case, and eventually questions her conviction. Another family member was with Idella the day she was killed: Ruth’s “fragile older brother” Jimmy, who had long depended on Ruth to take care of him. Why was he spirited out of town just before her indictment?

Reckoning is a hopeful act but rarely settles whatever inspired the need for it. Lowry reveals that as a girl she shared some of that era’s prejudices, which is honorable to admit, though not unexpected, but clearly continues to disturb her. As for the locals’ hesitation to discuss the killing, their reticence seems less about collective guilt than reluctance to revisit family disgrace. Rather, the significance of this story lies in its irresolution, in showing how, like bigotry, a violent crime will continue to cast a shadow over a community for generations, disturbing their sense of themselves as survivors.

Suzanne Berne’s latest novel, “The Blue Window,” will be published in January.

A Reckoning of Memory and Murder in the Mississippi Delta

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