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Summary
Summary
Don't miss the latest Natchez Burning novel, SOUTHERN MAN
The #1 New York Times Bestseller
GoodReads Choice Award semi finalist, Amazon Best Mysteries & Thrillers of 2017 selection
The final installment in the epic Natchez Burning trilogy by Greg Iles
"Natchez Burning is extraordinarily entertaining and fiendishly suspenseful. I defy you to start it and find a way to put it down; as long as it is, I wished it were longer. . . . This is an amazing work of popular fiction."
-- Stephen King
"One of the longest, most successful sustained works of popular fiction in recent memory... Prepare to be surprised. Iles has always been an exceptional storyteller, and he has invested these volumes with an energy and sense of personal urgency that rarely, if ever, falter."
-- Washington Post
The endgame is at hand for Penn Cage, his family, and the enemies bent on destroying them in this revelatory volume in the epic trilogy set in modern-day Natchez, Mississippi--Greg Iles's epic tale of love and honor, hatred and revenge that explores how the sins of the past continue to haunt the present.
Shattered by grief and dreaming of vengeance, Penn Cage sees his family and his world collapsing around him. The woman he loves is gone, his principles have been irrevocably compromised, and his father, once a paragon of the community that Penn leads as mayor, is about to be tried for the murder of a former lover. Most terrifying of all, Dr. Cage seems bent on self-destruction. Despite Penn's experience as a prosecutor in major murder trials, his father has frozen him out of the trial preparations--preferring to risk dying in prison to revealing the truth of the crime to his son.
During forty years practicing medicine, Tom Cage made himself the most respected and beloved physician in Natchez, Mississippi. But this revered Southern figure has secrets known only to himself and a handful of others. Among them, Tom has a second son, the product of an 1960s affair with his devoted African American nurse, Viola Turner. It is Viola who has been murdered, and her bitter son--Penn's half-brother--who sets in motion the murder case against his father. The resulting investigation exhumes dangerous ghosts from Mississippi's violent past. In some way that Penn cannot fathom, Viola Turner was a nexus point between his father and the Double Eagles, a savage splinter cell of the KKK. More troubling still, the long-buried secrets shared by Dr. Cage and the former Klansmen may hold the key to the most devastating assassinations of the 1960s. The surviving Double Eagles will stop at nothing to keep their past crimes buried, and with the help of some of the most influential men in the state, they seek to ensure that Dr. Cage either takes the fall for them, or takes his secrets to an early grave.
Unable to trust anyone around him--not even his own mother--Penn joins forces with Serenity Butler, a famous young black author who has come to Natchez to write about his father's case. Together, Penn and Serenity battle to crack the Double Eagles and discover the secret history of the Cage family and the South itself, a desperate move that risks the only thing they have left to gamble: their lives.
Mississippi Blood is the enthralling conclusion to a breathtaking trilogy seven years in the making--one that has kept readers on the edge of their seats. With piercing insight, narrative prowess, and a masterful ability to blend history and imagination, Greg Iles illuminates the brutal history of the American South in a highly atmospheric and suspenseful novel that delivers the shocking resolution his fans have eagerly awaited.
Author Notes
Bestselling novelist Greg Iles was born in 1960 in Stuttgart, Germany, where his father was in charge of the medical clinic at the U.S. Embassy. He grew up in Natchez, Mississippi and graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1983. Iles founded the band Frankly Scarlet and played music for a living for a few years before deciding to write. He belongs to the author rock band known as The Rock Bottom Remainders.
Iles's second novel, Black Cross, was awarded the Mississippi Author's Award for Fiction in 1995. His trilogy about Natchez, Mississippi (entitled the Penn Cage Series), made the New York Times bestseller list in 2014 with the first book, Natchez Burning. He made the list again in 2015 with his title The Bone Tree.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Both unwieldy and tightly controlled, bestseller Iles's terrific conclusion to his Natchez Burning trilogy (after 2015's The Bone Tree) is a sweeping story that remains intimate. The Double Eagles, a savage KKK splinter group, have declared a personal war on Penn Cage, a former prosecutor who's now the mayor of Natchez, Miss., necessitating 24-hour security protection for him and his family. The toxic bigotry escalates as Penn's father, Tom, once a respected physician, goes on trial for the murder of his former nurse and one-time lover, Viola Turner, an African-American who was suffering from terminal cancer. Penn teams with Serenity Butler, a famous black author who plans to write about Tom's case. Together, they look into the secrets of the Cage family, the Double Eagles, and the South. Though a side plot about J.F.K.'s assassination stretches credibility, relentless pacing keeps the story churning, with unexpected brutality erupting on nearly every page. The trial scenes are among the most exciting ever written in the genre. Eight-city author tour. Agents: Dan Conaway and Simon Lipskar, Writers House. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Delta whodunit master Iles (The Bone Tree, 2015, etc.) brings his politically charged, timely trilogy of Mississippi murder and mayhem to a thunderous close.Life for Penn Cage is never a bowl of cherries. A bucket of blood, more like it. As this last installment in the Natchez Burning trilogy opens, he's in a bloodier mess than ever, depressed, full of bitter self-awareness: "When someone you love is murdered," he reflects, "you learn things about yourself you'd give a great deal not to know." Other questions loom. Why is his jailed father stubbornly clinging to a secret guaranteed to shake up otherwise sleepy Natchez? Now that the Klan-on-steroids villains have come under new management, what kind of awful mischief are they going to make for the placeand how do they figure in that secret, anyway? To begin to answer those questions, Iles swings full circle back into the territory of the first volume and its unlikely archive of once-forbidden, even now fraught interracial relationships; "anyone in possession of those ledgers," Penn reveals, "would never have to worry about money again, so valuable would they be as a blackmail tool." No, but there are plenty of other things to worry about, things that make the normally even-keeled Penn feel not so bad about shooting a bad guy in the back, "where I know his heart is pumping violently." Iles mostly sticks to the format of the hard-boiled procedural, though there's some nicely wrought courtroom drama here, too, with a none-too-subtle dig at a fellow Southern mysterian: "The why doesn't come into it. That's for John Grisham and the Law Order writers to worry about." Speedboats, bullets, and floods of the red stuff fly and flow, wrapping up to a clean conclusionthough with the slightest hint of an out, in case Iles decides to stretch the trilogy into another book or two. Faulkner meets John D. MacDonald, and that's all to the good. A boisterous, spills-and-chills entertainment from start to finish. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Iles wraps up his massively ambitious Natchez Burning trilogy with a book that is (in keeping with its predecessors) compelling, dark, surprising, and morally ambiguous. Its hero, Penn Cage, has done things that might be considered reprehensible, but in these circumstances his father about to stand trial for a murder he might very well have committed; his fiancée having been recently murdered; and his family's lives in jeopardy we can understand why Penn steps outside the normal boundaries of acceptable behavior in his pursuit of the truth about his father and about the Double Eagles, a white-supremacist organization with a deep connection to the history of Mississippi and to Penn's own family. Familiarity with the first two books in the trilogy, Natchez Burning (2014) and The Bone Tree (2015), isn't a requirement here the author has devised a very clever way of bringing readers up to speed but, even so, there are some plot threads and references to previous events that might be missed by those jumping into the story in midstream. With these three novels, Iles has told an epic story that rips apart the modern history of Mississippi (he lives in Natchez himself), exposing a secret underbelly that, while fictional, feels real enough to have actually happened. This trilogy is destined to become a classic of literary crime fiction.--Pitt, David Copyright 2017 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Mississippi Blood concludes a trilogy within a series, following Natchez Burning and The Bone Tree. Listeners unfamiliar with the two earlier titles should read or listen to them in sequence as the characters and plots actually form a single, compelling thriller set in the South from the 1960s to the present. Central to this portion of the tale is Penn Cage's reaction to Dr. Tom Cage's trial for the murder of Viola Turner, an African American nurse Tom once employed. Penn and his daughter Annie are still in mortal danger from the menace of KKK radicals, the Double Eagles and their leader "Snake" Knox. The suspenseful activity (murder, mayhem, pursuit) is superb, and the conclusion is quite satisfying. Since Penn has narrowly escaped death and witnessed or committed murder several times, his irate, overly sensitive reactions to details of his father's defense may seem a bit much. Narrator Scott Brick's characterizations are excellent-consistent and emotional. Verdict Highly recommended for adult audio collections. ["Heart-racing, enthralling thriller": LJ 12/16 starred review of the Morrow hc.]-Cliff Glaviano, formerly with Bowling Green State Univ. Libs., OH © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.