NONFICTION - Sept. 4, 1994

MISSISSIPPI MUD: Southern Justice and the Dixie Mafia by Edward Humes (Simon & Schuster: $23; 368 pp.) Murder, conspiracy, and an extremely lucrative personal-ad scam are the subjects of “Mississippi Mud,” Edward Humes’ fast-paced account of the 1987 double homicide of Biloxi mayoral candidate Margaret Sherry and her husband, Vince, a prominent lawyer. The book focuses on the Sherrys’ oldest daughter, Lynn, who became obsessed with finding out who murdered her parents--obsessed to the point of jeopardizing her own life, and the emotional health of her kids. Her struggle reads like a cross between a suspense novel and an ethnographic study of Biloxi’s underworld. Humes writes with a staunch no-nonsense style that is, perhaps, a bit more complex than that of many true crime books, but stops short of the subtlety and depth that propels a work to rise above its genre. Lynn’s character is painted in primary colors--angry, grieving, determined. It’s impossible not to imagine the mini-series. The most interesting person captured here is Kirksey Nix, a brilliant, amoral and darkly charismatic prison inmate whose exact role in the killings is never completely clear. Nix ran a successful business preying on lonely homosexual men who answered personal ads; he had specially coded computers, labyrinthine systems of cash delivery and a small army of employees both inside and outside of the prison. In spite of solid writing, “Mississippi Mud” is an engrossing, unremarkable book.