The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford

Four wives. Five murders. One very bad, very dead husband. Rich Milford is dead. At last. In the Black town of Newville, Oklahoma, Rich Milford has spent his life doing exactly as he pleases. A moonshiner, womaniser and self-styled prophet, he runs his eccentric household with rigid rules, strange beliefs and casual cruelty. Now he's been found dead. At his funeral, the town gathers to speculate. The obvious suspects are the women closest to Rich: his four wives - Lally, Sophronia, Georgette and Vivianne - along with Alberta, the cook who has held the Milford household together for decades. Each of these women has a story to tell. Each believes, with absolute certainty, that she is the one who killed him. As their accounts unfold, they reveal a household thick with secrets: forbidden love, suppressed rage, poisoned pies, stolen money, superstition, desire and grief. With each woman's story, the truth splinters further, and the idea of a single version of events begins to collapse. Threaded through all of this is the voice of Newville itself - a sharp, gossipy, communal chorus that watches, judges and ultimately decides what justice will look like.

Nafissa Thompson-Spires is the author of the award-winning, National Book Award longlisted short story collection, Heads of the Colored People. She earned a doctorate in English from ­­­­Vanderbilt University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from ­­­­­­the University of Illinois. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review Daily, New York Magazine's "The Cut," The Root, The White Review, Ploughshares, 400 Souls: A Community History of African America 1619-2019, and The 1619 Project, among other publications. She is the recipient of a 2024 United States Artists Grant and a 2019 Whiting Award.