Shockingly, it took until 2022 for Congress to pass an anti-lynching law, something you'd assume had been ratified centuries earlier. Or maybe it's not so shocking, since several books —including this week's "In the Pines" — insist that lynching is very much with us.

I thought a lot about that when I read Cynthia Carr's 2007 "Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town and the Hidden History of White America." It's about the 1930 murder of two Black men who were (wrongly, probably) jailed in Marion, Ind., on suspicion of murder and rape.

There's a famous photo of the killings. As Carr scanned onlookers depicted in the photograph, she realized she was looking for her grandfather. Much like Truman Capote, Carr goes to the small town to gather stories from survivors and, much like Capote's "In Cold Blood," her book is both a riveting account of an actual crime and an absorbing reflection on memory and meaning. Many of the people Carr interviews are white, which unbalances the book, but she puts James Cameron — a third youth, who survived the lynchings — at its center.

Carr is not the only granddaughter re-examining her ancestor's role in a lynching. In "In the Pines," Grace Elizabeth Hale questions her sheriff grandfather's presence at the 1947 murder of a Black Mississippian named Versie Johnson. Like Carr, Hale, who is white, is uncomfortable about writing about actions that affected Black people more significantly than white people. Her book, subtitled "A Lynching, a Lie, a Reckoning," grapples with that.

Hale writes, "If being able to understand yourself as living free of the past is a foundational part of white supremacy, then putting your own family inside the stream of history is a part of the project of dismantling it." Her book wrestles with loving her late grandfather, who was almost certainly a white supremacist and murderer.

Aware that some will say this is not her story to tell, Hale puts the man who was lynched at the center of "Pines." Her study of Johnson is stymied by sketchy records, but Hale learns as much as she can — lamenting that Johnson's understandably suspicious descendants didn't respond to her.

Hale uses a practice employed in Harvard historian Tiya Alicia Miles' incredible "All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake" (about the centuries-old belongings of an enslaved woman). She uses context clues and primary historical records to suggest what may have happened in specific situations.

Where "In the Pines" is strongest is in conveying the atmosphere that made a lynching possible, in front of multiple witnesses. Hale also reminds us that history often ignores the powerless and disenfranchised.

There's probably no better way to underscore that than to read Mamie Till-Mobley's 2003 "Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America." Although it was published decades later, she writes about son Emmett Till's life and death (in 1955) with near-total recall.

Early chapters describe the teenager who was killed while visiting family in Mississippi. A mother can be forgiven for sentimentalizing her dead son, but other accounts blend with hers to paint a portrait of a remarkable boy who never got to show the world what he was capable of.

Till-Mobley famously insisted on an open casket for her brutalized son's funeral, saying she wanted to "let the world see what I've seen." Her detailed description of examining his corpse is similarly unflinching. So is her contention, echoed by Carr and Hale, that lynching is not something from the past — not just, as Billie Holiday sang, "Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze."

They insist lynching continues around the country today (Hale argues George Floyd was lynched) in the form of the killing of Black people, without due process, in public and without remorse.