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’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’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’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’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: “Perhaps we expect too much of our fathers.” Though it’s sometimes easier not to acknowledge life’s most uncomfortable truths, as one character puts it, “Sooner or later, everything comes to the surface, doesn’t it?” Smart, funny, and sexy, you’ll keep thinking about it long after the violent final pages.--Neal Thompson