Natchez Burning: A Novel (Penn Cage)
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, May 2014:Greg Iles has written a sprawling, gothic, suspenseful, emotional, page-turner of a book. In doing so, he&#x2019;s confronted the darkest secrets of his home state of Mississippi. Shifting between the 1960s (not a pretty period in Mississippi history) and the present, it&#x2019;s the story of a respected doctor accused of murdering his former nurse, an African-American woman who has returned to Natchez after many years up north. The doctor&#x2019;s son, Penn Cage (featured in previous Iles novels), is a former prosecutor, now the mayor of Natchez, whose attempts to clear his father bring him face to face with a fringe KKK sect, men who personify the South&#x2019;s historic evils. Packed to the point of overflow with racial politics, family secrets, illicit love, corruption, racism, brutality, and fear, this 800-page book is really a father-son story. Yet, as Iles suggests in the opening pages: &#x201C;Perhaps we expect too much of our fathers.&#x201D; Though it&#x2019;s sometimes easier not to acknowledge life&#x2019;s most uncomfortable truths, as one character puts it, &#x201C;Sooner or later, everything comes to the surface, doesn&#x2019;t it?&#x201D; Smart, funny, and sexy, you&#x2019;ll keep thinking about it long after the violent final pages.--Neal Thompson