Greg Iles

Penn Cage, a former prosecutor and now a successful author, has recently lost his wife. To find himself again, he decides to spend some time with his parents in his hometown, a small town in Mississippi. It is like finding oneself > on the thin boundary of a universe of vibrant life and mysterious death, of hidden secrets and glittering facades, and of races inextricably bound by blood and tears, geography and religion, and above all time . In the town, long gripped by severe economic decline, silence and complicity prevail, for both Black and white residents wish to be left in peace, to “keep things quiet, lovely, and easy” so as to attract new investments to the area. By chance, Penn finds himself entangled in a crime that occurred twenty years earlier (a Black man was mysteriously murdered), at the very moment a powerful local figure, Judge Marston, accused his father—a respected family doctor—of having committed grave malpractice in the exercise of his profession. Sensing a link between Marston and the murder, Penn resolves to investigate the bloodshed out of a desire for vengeance against Marston’s accusations—false, as it turns out—against his father. In reality, he still feels guilty about what transpired all those years ago: he had had an affair with Marston’s daughter, the alluring Livy, and remains convinced that the judge sought to punish his father because of their relationship. Can the past be undone? > Who among us, if offered the opportunity, would not want to relive the day or the hour when we first tasted love, or made a choice that forever altered our future, denying a life we might have had? But this sentiment is a trap, because Penn > realizes with muffled surprise (that) intimacy with Livy is not a new experience. It is like walking through a checkpoint into a country I visited long ago and to which I return, older and, I hope, wiser . Indeed, as he presses forward with an investigation rife with plot twists and bloodshed, Penn uncovers that the murder of a poor Black man was entangled in national conspiracies (the machinations of the FBI's then-powerful director and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.), and that Marston’s motives were far more prosaic than he had imagined: the eternal lust for money. Above all, he must face the reality that Livy is a hollow, selfish figure, irrevocably trapped in her squalid past. Shattering the quiet of his childhood town allows Penn to unburden himself of the weight and suffering of memory, reclaiming life not by retreating into the past, but by looking toward the future. The novel’s greatest strengths lie in its setting and its style, polished and meticulous in its prose. As an illustration of this writing, one need only note the sweetness, distinctly Southern and rural, of the townscape described by the author: > the tree-lined road is dotted with trailers and small houses, but as I approach the two-hundred-year-old Episcopal church that defines the settlement, the trees recede, and the grounds flanked by splendid plantations stretch out on either side of the road. Beyond the moss-draped cedars and white fences, swans drift majestically across the ponds, so much so that it feels like being in England . The trouble is that this literary refinement comes at the expense of narrative architecture, which is frequently sluggish and weighed down by episodes tangential to the central plot. The progression toward the denouement is so drawn out that it borders on tedium. Why read it? It is engaging, elegant, and compelling in its evocation of place.