The #1 New York Times Bestseller
GoodReads Choice Award semi finalist, Amazon Best Mysteries &
Thrillers of 2017 selection
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."
-- Stephen King
"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.
