Paris Trout

Paris Trout is a novel by the American writer Pete Dexter, published in 1988 and set in a small town in Georgia in the 1950s.

The book opens on the killing. Paris Trout has been selling a car to a Black family, and when the arrangement falls apart he shoots the man's younger sister dead and wounds his mother. There is no mystery about who fired the shots, and what stays open is what the town and its courts are prepared to do about it. What follows is the case built around the crime and the community's slow, unwilling response to it, in a place where the standing of the man at the centre is the reason he has been able to behave as he does.

The novel won the National Book Award for Fiction and was later adapted for television. The Los Angeles Times called it a masterpiece when it appeared, and it was afterwards adapted as a television film of the same name.