Penn Cage is no stranger to death. As a Houston prosecutor he sent sixteen men to death row, and watched seven of them die. But now, in the aftermath of his wife's death, the grief-stricken father packs up his four-year-old daughter, Annie, and returns to his hometown in search of healing. But peace is not what he finds there.
Natchez, Mississippi, is the jewel of the antebellum South, a city of old money and older sins, where passion, power, and racial tensions seethe beneath its elegant façade. After twenty years away, Penn is stunned to find his own family trapped in a web of intrigue and danger.
Determined to save his father from a ruthless blackmailer, Penn stumbles over a link to the town's darkest secret: the thirty-year-old unsolved murder of a black Korean War veteran. But what drives him to act is the revelation that this haunting mystery is inextricably bound up in his own past. Under a blaze of national media attention, Penn reopens the case, only to find local records destroyed, the FBI file sealed, and the town closing ranks against him.
Penn joins forces with Caitlin Masters, a beautiful young newspaper publisher, on a quest that will lead from the bayous of the South to the highest reaches of the U.S. government. His need to right a terrible wrong pits him against the FBI, the powerful judge who nearly destoyed his family, and his most dangerous adversary: a woman he loved more than twenty years before, and who haunts him still. His crusade for justice will ultimately lead him into a packed Mississippi courtroom, where he fights a battle that could end a decades-old silence and force the truth to be spoken at last.
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"A good fast-paced read, with action, mystery, and quietly compelling, tasteful sex. The local color (Natchez, on the bluffs of the Mississippi River) plays a starring role, perhaps with more verisimilitude than some of the characters. Very good plotting. Some of the best prose I've read in a thriller novel. Iles really does know how to write. Yes, there are the heart-strings twisting cliches: a lone celeb dad and his daughter recovering from the death to cancer of his wife; the good country doctor (McCoy Southern style) and his wife; the power-hungry, unprincipled FBI director; and the retired, hard-boiled Clint Eastwood-like FBI agent brimming with integrity. But the truly badass Southern cop is no stereotype. The character of Livy Marston was convincing. Apart from her simmering sexuality (yup, I'm a guy, and it worked on me), the inner tension and mystery surrounding her past carried through right to the end. I would like to have seen more conflict on Penn's part around his attractions to Livy and Caitlin Masters -- both stunning, wealthy, daring, but from different cultures, North and South. But once Livy appeared on the scene, she seemed to suck the oxygen out of Penn's relationship with Caitlin. A shame. Seems there was some good ore left there unmined. Perhaps the author felt it would've diverted from the main plot line, but I have faith that if he'd given it his attention, he could've pulled it off.
I would have rated this book 5-stars but for two things. The big conspiracy it's centered around just didn't carry the kind of impact it needed to. So rather than climax and denouement, it was a bit of a ho-hum. The second was a glaring oversight on the part of protag Penn that seemed totally uncharacteristic and designed solely to set up a surprise reveal during the novel's climactic scene. [I'll give more detail below after the Spoiler Alert line.] But all in all, this is a good one -- far better than much of the junk they pass off these days under the Thriller genre.
SPOILER ALERT BEYOND THIS POINT:
The scene in question is when Penn learns from that the waitress in the bar who thinks she's his illegitimate daughter that she has actual recordings of phone conversations between the New Orleans crime boss and Leo Marsten. Penn blithely shows no interest. In real life, anyone in his situation would've been all over those tapes asap. This allows Penn to introduce the waitress and tapes at the trial and carry the day. A bit of cheating by the author, in my opinion.
Bi"
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Robert (4 out of 5 stars)