Series: Book 6 in the Penn Cage series
Rating: *****
Tags: Lang:en
Summary
The #1
New York Times Bestseller
The final installment in the epic
Natchez Burning trilogy by Greg Iles
“
Natchez Burning is extraordinarily entertaining
and fiendishly suspenseful. I defy you to start it and find a
way to put it down; as long as it is, I wished it were
longer. . . . This is an amazing work of popular
fiction.”
“One of the longest, most successful sustained
works of popular fiction in recent memory… Prepare to
be surprised. Iles has always been an exceptional
storyteller, and he has invested these volumes with an energy
and sense of personal urgency that rarely, if ever,
falter.”
— *Washington
Post* The endgame is at hand for Penn Cage, his family, and the
enemies bent on destroying them in this revelatory volume in
the epic trilogy set in modern-day Natchez,
Mississippi—Greg Iles’s epic tale of love and
honor, hatred and revenge that explores how the sins of the
past continue to haunt the present. Shattered by grief and dreaming of vengeance, Penn Cage sees
his family and his world collapsing around him. The woman he
loves is gone, his principles have been irrevocably
compromised, and his father, once a paragon of the community
that Penn leads as mayor, is about to be tried for the murder
of a former lover. Most terrifying of all, Dr. Cage seems bent
on self-destruction. Despite Penn's experience as a prosecutor
in major murder trials, his father has frozen him out of the
trial preparations--preferring to risk dying in prison to
revealing the truth of the crime to his son. During forty years practicing medicine, Tom Cage made
himself the most respected and beloved physician in Natchez,
Mississippi. But this revered Southern figure has secrets known
only to himself and a handful of others. Among them, Tom
has a second son, the product of an 1960s affair with his
devoted African American nurse, Viola Turner. It is Viola
who has been murdered, and her bitter son--Penn's
half-brother--who sets in motion the murder case against his
father. The resulting investigation exhumes dangerous
ghosts from Mississippi's violent past. In some way that Penn
cannot fathom, Viola Turner was a nexus point between his
father and the Double Eagles, a savage splinter cell of the
KKK. More troubling still, the long-buried secrets shared by
Dr. Cage and the former Klansmen may hold the key to the most
devastating assassinations of the 1960s. The surviving Double
Eagles will stop at nothing to keep their past crimes buried,
and with the help of some of the most influential men in the
state, they seek to ensure that Dr. Cage either takes the fall
for them, or takes his secrets to an early grave. Unable to trust anyone around him--not even his own
mother--Penn joins forces with Serenity Butler, a famous young
black author who has come to Natchez to write about his
father's case. Together, Penn and Serenity battle to crack the
Double Eagles and discover the secret history of the Cage
family and the South itself, a desperate move that risks the
only thing they have left to gamble: their lives.
Mississippi Blood is the enthralling conclusion to a
breathtaking trilogy seven years in the making--one that has
kept readers on the edge of their seats. With piercing insight,
narrative prowess, and a masterful ability to blend history and
imagination, Greg Iles illuminates the brutal history of the
American South in a highly atmospheric and suspenseful novel
that delivers the shocking resolution his fans have eagerly
awaited. **
— Stephen King