#1 New York Times bestselling author Greg Iles has earned outstanding critical praise and a legion of fans for his novels including The Quiet Game, Turning Angel, and Devil’s Punchbowl. Iles has shown he has incredible range is his ability to craft exceptional suspense novels featuring compelling, multidimensional characterization.
Now, in the literary publishing event of the summer, Iles presents his most ambitious and powerful work to date with NATCHEZ BURNING (William Morrow/An Imprint of Harper CollinsPublishers; Pub date: April 29, 2014, ISBN 978-0-06-231107-8; $27.99 US/$34.99 Canada), the auspicious first volume in a trilogy featuring Penn Cage. A spectacular and grand epic novel that spans 40 years and unflinchingly captures the political unrest of a nation dangling between a chaotic past and an unpredictable future. The historic town of Natchez, Mississippi, is the backdrop for this remarkable thriller, a place inextricably bound to our national identity. It is a place where fiercely held convictions about race have undergone enormous change at great cost to human life over the last decades.
As a former prosecutor and writer living in the small town of Natchez, Mississippi, where he grew up, Penn Cage has always been a fighter. He’s never been one to see injustice and do nothing about it. He learned it from his father, Tom Cage, a beloved family doctor who spent decades taking care of folks no matter their origin or circumstance, rich or poor, black or white. Penn has always thought of his dad as a sort of Atticus Finch, a man who has guts and backbone even when his friends and neighbors don’t. And the old adage couldn’t be more true: ‘Like father, like son’. Or is it?
In a place like rural Mississippi, when the issues are race and crime, the pressures are formidable and the risks no less life-threatening. So when Tom Cage finds himself on the verge of being charged with murder—of his long-time nurse assistant and friend Viola Turner—Penn knows he must find the truth. The catch: his father believes client privilege forbids him from talking about the night in question and so refuses to say anything to help himself or Penn.
Penn soon learns that Viola’s death is only the tip of the iceberg—for it brings into question several horrific, unsolved murders in the 1960s, one of which was her brother’s. And it points to a group of secretive KKK members who call themselves the ‘Double Eagles’, a crew that has cut a swath across the area for decades and includes some of the wealthiest and most ruthless businessmen in the state, and brothers Frank and Snake Knox, men who have been born and bred to always get their way. Until now.
About the author: Greg Iles was born in Germany in 1960, where his father ran the US Embassy Medical Clinic during the height of the Cold War. Iles spent his youth in Natchez, Mississippi, and graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1983. After several years playing in the band “Frankly Scarlet,” Iles wrote his first novel in 1993, Spandau Phoenix, which became the first of twelve New York Times bestsellers. With his third novel, Mortal Fear, Iles began setting his novels in Mississippi, and in The Quiet Game, his fourth, he created Penn Cage and placed him in Iles’s own hometown of Natchez, the oldest city on the Mississippi River. In 2011, Greg sustained life-threatening injuries in an automobile accident on Highway 61 near Natchez. He remained in a medically-induced coma for eight days and ultimately lost part of his right leg. Doctors declared his survival miraculous and predicted a long recovery, yet early in his rehabilitation, Greg found comfort and motivation by re-entering the world of the character, the town, and the secrets that his fans loved most. The road into these novels proved to be the road back to life. Iles is a member of the lit-rock group “The Rock Bottom Remainders” that includes authors Dave Barry, Ridley Pearson, Stephen King, Scott Turow, Amy Tan, Mitch Albom, Roy Blount, Jr., Matt Groening, Kathi Kamen Goldmark*, James McBride and Roger McGuinn. Iles lives in Natchez, Mississippi, and has two teenaged children. His novels have been made into films, translated into more than twenty languages, and published in more than thirty-five countries worldwide.