The Red Parts begins with the reopening of a decades-old murder case; the killing of Nelson’s aunt.

This crime that had already haunted her earlier book Jane: A Murder. Nelson writes through the trial proceedings, through media spectacle, through family memory, examining what it means to narrate violence.

The book sits at the hinge between her early hybrid work and the more formally elastic prose that is seen in The Argonauts. Rather than resolving trauma, Nelson interrogates the structures that convert private grief into public narrative.