BOOK REVIEW: Natchez Burning

After waiting five very long years. Greg Iles fans finally have NATCHEZ BURNING. I was eighth on the waiting list at the library and it seemed like another five years until my turn came. (I was happy to learn that I was not the only Iles fan in town).

NATCHEZ BURNING. opens in 1964 with the brutal murder of three black young men and the burning of a popular music store and its black owner. Several influential white men had broken away from the Klu Klux Klan to form their own group, the Double Eagles. One of the young men murdered had been involved with the daughter of a founding member of the Double Eagles. These events were to have a devastating effect on present day Natchez.

Doctor Tom Cage has been treating patients in Natchez for over forty years. He is loved and respected by the people in town for his compassion whether the patient is poor, wealthy, black or white. His recent heart attack has caused him to take life a little easier, but he still feels responsible for the sick.

Viola Turner, his African-American nurse from the sixties, has returned to Natchez to die. She had escaped to Chicago during those violent days under mysterious circumstances, but is back under the care of Dr. Cage. When she is found murdered and the police are given a tape that implicates Tom, he is arrested for killing her. Tom’s son Penn, a former prosecuting lawyer turned novelist, is now the mayor of Natchez. Trying to prove his father innocent, he soon finds himself and his family at risk.

The Double Eagles may have grown older and achieved more power, but their brutality and racial hatreds are still very much alive.

Greg Iles is back with probably his best effort to date. Reviewers are comparing him to Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner. I simply could not put this book down. It is full of passion dealing with race relations - then and now, unheard of violence, age old traditions, and angers that have smoldered for years set against love of family. All of these things mixed in with the national history of the early 60’s, the years that saw some shocking assassinations.

There are several incidents from earlier books that featured Penn Cage, but it is not necessary to have read them, though they are some of my favorite books. Be reminded, although this is an author who is an expert at word usage and flow of action, he also can be very graphically violent.

NATCHEZ BURNING. is book one of a trilogy. It comes to a good ending in many ways, but enough strings are hanging that you will want to find out more about the Cage family. I only hope that I do not have to wait five more years.