BOOK REVIEW: The Bone Tree

NEWS FLASH: I just finished THE BONE TREE and am dying to tell you all about it... but, I can’t. It would be doing you a terrible disservice.

You have to understand that THE BONE TREE is the middle book in Greg Iles’ trilogy that started with Natchez Burning and neither of these books is a stand alone novel. Usually, I find that the middle book in a trilogy is a disappointment, but I could not put this book down. It is full of surprises and fast action as well as character development of people that I thought  I knew.

THE BONE TREE is actually the fifth book by Iles to feature Penn Cage and his family. That means that Penn, his fiancee Caitlin, his parents and daughter, as well as many of the people around town are old friends of ours. Now we are learning secrets and seeing sides of them that give them even more depth. Some things are not so pretty.

Natchez Burning gave us some background of the terrible racial situation in the 1960’s. An offshoot of the KKK that called themselves the Double Eagles were responsible for horrific acts of racial violence and the recent murder of Doctor Tom Cage’s African-American nurse brings the past and the present too close together. Doctor Cage has been accused of the murder and is on the run from a corrupt police system as well as the remaining Double Eagles.

Caitlin and Penn have reason to believe that the head of the Double Eagles may have played a big part in the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King and that Doctor Cage knows more about the details of these murders than is healthy for any part of his family.

So far, each of the first two books in the trilogy have come to somewhat of a conclusion, but has left the reader waiting, not too patiently, for the third and final explanation. (I wish I could tell you more!)

Greg Iles is very high on my favorite author list and he has not disappointed me with his latest offering. If he is a new author to you, I would recommend some of his earlier books while waiting for the third Natchez Burning book.  (It is not due until April 2017!) The Devil’s Punchbowl is very good and the action happens just before the start of Natchez Burning. If you like action that gets gritty at times and is written by an author who has an ear for dialogue and character, you will get hooked.