Natchez Burning

✍ Scribed by Iles, Greg

• Book ID: 108420167
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 489 KB
• Series: Penn Cage 4
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9780007304868

✦ Synopsis

#1 New York Times bestselling author Greg Iles returns with his most eagerly anticipated novel yet and his first in five years—Natchez Burning—the first installment in an epic trilogy that interweaves crimes, lies, and secrets past and present in a mesmerizing thriller featuring Southern lawyer and former prosecutor Penn Cage. Growing up in the rural Southern hamlet of Natchez, Mississippi, Penn Cage learned everything he knows about honor and duty from his father, Tom Cage. But now the beloved family doctor and pillar of the community is accused of murdering Violet Turner, the beautiful nurse with whom he worked in the dark days of the early 1960s. A fighter who has always stood for justice, Penn is determined to save his father, even though Tom, stubbornly evoking doctor-patient privilege, refuses to speak up in his own defense. The quest for answers sends Penn deep into the past—into the heart of a conspiracy of greed and murder involving the Double Eagles, a vicious KKK crew headed by one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the state. With the aid of a local friend and reporter privy to some of Natchez's oldest and deadliest secrets, Penn follows a bloody trail that stretches back forty years, to one undeniable fact: no one—black or white, young or old, brave or not—is ever truly safe. With everything on the line, including his own life, Penn must decide how far he will go to protect those he loves . . . and see justice done, once and for all. Rich in Southern atmosphere and electrifying plot turns, Natchez Burning marks the brilliant return of a genuine American master of suspense. Tense and disturbing, it is the most explosive, exciting, sexy, and ambitious story Greg Iles has written yet. In the course of its considerable length, “Natchez Burning” deals with a great many subjects: loyalty to one’s family vs. loyalty to such abstractions as truth and justice, the nature and cost of professional ambition, and the once-incendiary subject of sexual relations between the races. More than anything, though, this impassioned novel is concerned with the pervasive impact of past events, events that refuse to remain buried. Natchez Burning is itself an embodiment of a famous statement by William Faulkner, a statement that has found its way into more than one of Iles’s novels: “The past is never dead; it’s not even past. If it were, there would be no grief or sorrow.” The result is an impressive beginning to what could prove to be an epic exploration of the nation’s secrets and hidden sins, and it marks the return of a gifted novelist who has been out of the public eye for much too long. Like Stephen King — a fellow member of that literary garage band, the Rock Bottom Remainders — Iles has come back from a near-fatal accident to produce his most searching and ambitious work to date. “Natchez Burning” obliterates the artificial distinction between genre and literary fiction with passion, grace and considerable style. This is Greg Iles at his formidable best. It’s good to have him back.