Natchez Burning
By Cindy Bagwell 
(The Dallas Morning News)

It doesn’t pay to be one of the good guys in Greg Iles’ world.

Villainous or heroic, you’re equally likely to meet a painful ― and painfully described ― end.

“Natchez Burning,” the first of a trilogy and the fourth outing for Iles’ protagonist Penn Cage, begins with a warning against deifying mere mortals. Even gods have feet of clay, and in Iles’ South, they’re likely to have blood on their hands, too.

Cage’s father, Tom, is suspected of killing his former nurse, Viola Turner. The saintly doctor (modeled on Iles’ own father, who died while this book was being written), revered by members of the black community he cared for and well-respected by his fellow upper-class whites, has preserved the secrets as well the health of both groups.

Viola, who fled Natchez 40 years ago after the disappearance of her brother, a musician and civil-rights activist, has terminal cancer and has come home to die. She, too, is a locked treasure chest of secrets, and local reporter Henry Sexton thinks ― hopes ― that finally, at the end of her life, she might be willing to set the record straight about the mystery of not only her brother’s end, but that of several others.

Penn, a former prosecutor who’s now mayor of Natchez, is at first contemptuous of the murder charge ― then stunned when his father refuses to offer a defense. Penn’s search for a reason for his father’s actions takes him back to the 1960s, just after the murder of Medgar Evers, and uncovers a plot targeting Robert Kennedy.

His crusade to save his frail father from prison stirs up a nest of now-aged but still venomous racists and their offspring, the kind of guys who quit the Klan because it was just too wussy. Penn finally finds the spider at the center of the web. He’s a kind of Deep South Moriarty. Who has his own flamethrower.

If revisiting the awful deeds done in the cause of white supremacy in the ’60s makes you shudder, this book is going to be a tough read in places. Likewise if painstaking descriptions of torture and death make you queasy. I read a lot of this book at the gym, and spent many minutes praying that the person on the next treadmill wasn’t trying to check out my read.

And he’s not making these things up: Iles credits the work of reporter Stanley Nelson (the Concordia Sentinel in Louisiana), who he says covered the actual crimes that form the backdrop of “Natchez Burning.”

At 800 pages, the book feels overwritten in some spots, but still manages to keep the pages flying past. And that works out pretty well at the end, when you’re reading only every other word because YOU MUST FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS.

One major theme of the book is disillusionment, and sure enough, nobody in it comes out clean. (Well, hardly anybody; some folks aren’t alive long enough to get too dirty.)

Another is family. Iles says that writing about the South, when you’re from the South, is like writing about family: “You love it so much, and yet you can simultaneously hate some things about it.” (MCT)