[title subtitle=”review Anita Paddock”][/title]
By Greg Iles
William Morrow, 800 pages: $27.99
In Natchez Burning, author Greg Iles takes us to the worst time in his home state of Mississippi for a story filled with suspense, secrets and unsolved crimes. For those of us old enough to remember reading in newspapers and magazines about the racial riots and murders in the Deep South during the 1960s, the novel makes us once again grimace and feel ashamed. For those who only know about those horrific days from lessons in history books, this book is an eye-opener, going deep into the underbelly of that time, revealing the troubling truth that prominent and wealthy men belonged to secret organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the Double Eagles, an off-shoot of the Klan that was even more brutal because it plotted against integrationists in powerful positions in our national government.
At the heart of the book is Southern lawyer and former prosecutor Penn Cage. Penn is representing his father, a white doctor accused of assisting a suicide for his former black nurse, Viola, who returned from forty years in Chicago to die at home. He is puzzled why his father won’t assist in his own defense. Penn and he and his fiancée Caitlin Masters begin digging into the real reason Viola left Natchez in the first place. They meet Henry Sexton, a newspaper man who is obsessed with the past and hell-bent on exposing it since he was one of the witnesses to racially driven murders when he was a young man.
The trail they follow puts them in danger, and suspense mounts as Penn learns more and more about what happened decades before. It is in this exploration of our country’s troubled past, and in the cover up that followed, that this author shines. He easily transfers the reader from the present to the past in telling the horrors of the men who drove Viola away and caused the death of innocent black men, one of whom was suspected of hiding a friend who dared to love a white woman.
This is a long novel, but it doesn’t feel that way because so much is happening, and so much is at stake. Many are calling Natchez Burning Iles’ best book. That’s saying something, since he’s such a prolific writer, whose work has hit the number one spot on the New York Times bestseller list. What keeps readers engaged is the pace of this book. At every turn, there’s another revelation, another twist in this intricate plot. Even after the book ends, readers will likely want to know more, and that’s fine since this is the first in a trilogy the writer is working to complete. His second installation, The Bone Tree, will be released on April 28, 2015.
Natchez Burning was inspired by unsolved race murders in 1960s’ Louisiana and Mississippi that have been written about by a reporter for the Concordia Sentinel in Concordia Parish, Louisiana. You can look up Stanley Nelson’s articles to find out more about this time in our nation’s history.
