Ten new members join the book club at Wilkinson County Correctional Facility, and their arrival reshapes the room. As host Alan Huffman goes around the circle asking what each man likes to read — biographies, westerns, mysteries, Christian books, true crime — a portrait emerges of readers searching for something real, something that moves, something that might explain the choices that led them here.
The selection process is rarely simple. In a club of 25, tastes range from vampire novels to Malcolm X, from Harry Potter to Lonesome Dove. But this session takes an unexpected turn when a new member named Dollar quietly shares that Natchez author Greg Iles — whose sprawling, history-soaked Mississippi thrillers the club has long admired — just died. The news lands hard. Dollar knew him personally, had coached football with him, had ridden in the ambulance after his accident years ago.
From that moment of grief comes a rare convergence: another new member, who goes by 69, nominates Iles' The Bone Tree — a 900-page mystery novel woven through with KKK ties, organized crime, and threads that reach all the way to the Kennedy assassination. It's the second book in a trilogy they haven't started. None of that matters. The vote is nearly unanimous.
This episode is about how a book gets chosen, and what that process reveals: about appetite, attention, and what these men are really looking for between the lines.
Books mentioned in this episode: The Bone Tree by Greg Iles | Station 11 by Emily St. John Mandel | Where the Line Bleeds by Jesmyn Ward | A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah | The Hate You Give by Angie Thomas | War by Sebastian Junger | No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy | James by Percival Everett | Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury | Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut | The Autobiography of Malcolm X
