David Fuller's admirable new book should be commended, and probably purchased, on its gutsiness alone.

This is a book that straddles two genres: the murder mystery and the slave narrative. The first is a safe category, but it's a risk for a white writer to attempt the second and for the publisher to publish it. The writer risks distraction from the tale, the publisher risks sales on several fronts and they both risk critical backlash from writers and critics of color.

As a murder mystery, set in the Civil War, "Sweetsmoke" is more than enough of a success. The plot, revolving around the murder of a free black woman named Emoline Justice, does the two things it has to in order to satisfy: It holds attention and it holds water.

The protagonist, a crypto-literate slave named Cassius, is a near perfect hero -- wounded, realistic, resilient and intelligent. The murdered woman taught him how to read and made his existence something that could be endured; in the watchful and disillusioned way common to heroes, he had loved Justice.

Fuller has created for his main character an equally compelling antagonist, the disturbed and disturbing slave owner, Hoke Howard, a well-made villain, his repugnance all the more potent for being multidimensional. Fuller's research pays off; the experience of slavery is drawn with detail: A description of the tiny but tenacious hookworms that a young boy has to pull off the underside of tobacco leaves segues seamlessly into the observation that the news of even the most distant white person's death is big news, delivered through field chants -- and that someone close to you might be taken away. Sold. From hookworms to large choruses, from the irritating to the devastating.

Fuller's brush work is elegant and subtle; he paints a rich and believable world. The question is whether it's enough. Are his considerable novelist's skill sufficient to keep the reader's eyes and thought from jumping from the white face on the inside jacket author's photo to the black hands on the cover picture? Enough to forget the controversy when William Styron wrote a first-person novel about Nat Turner? To wonder if it's permissible at all to make an aesthetic experience out of a horror that affected neither you nor anyone to whom you are bound by blood?

That question will be answered differently by different individuals. If you can answer "yes," however, you will find "Sweetsmoke" worth the price of admission, because it does what a good murder mystery should do: It entertains while provoking just enough thought to make it worth turning off the TV.

Emily Carter is the author of "Glory Goes and Gets Some." She lives in Minneapolis.