Natchez Burning
‘Extraordinarily entertaining and fiendishly suspenseful’ (Stephen King). The stunning new Penn Cage thriller in which a shocking murder from the 1960s finds new life - and victims - in the present.The sins of the past never die…Raised in Natchez, Mississippi, former prosecuting attorney Penn Cage learned all he knows of honour and duty from his father, Dr. Tom Cage.But now Tom stands accused of murdering on African-American nurse with whom he worked in the 1960s, when racist violence was at its peak.As he hunts for the truth, Penn uncovers a long-buried secret that could place his family in mortal danger- a conspiracy of greed and murder connected to a vicious sect of the KKK.Up against the most powerful men in the state, Penn faces an impossible choice: does a man of honour choose his father or justice?
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GREG ILES
Natchez Burning
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Copyright © Greg Iles 2014
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Cover photographs © Tom Kidd/Alamy (burning cross);
JG Martin/Getty Images (trees); AVTG/Getty Images (sky)
Greg Iles asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007317967
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2014 ISBN: 9780007317981
Version: 2017-07-18
To
Stanley Nelson, of the Concordia Sentinel.
A humble hero.
And all the victims of the Civil Rights movement
Mississippi and Louisiana
1960â1969
For nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost. There isalways the clue, the canceled check, the smearof lipstick, the footprint in the canna bed, thecondom on the park path, the twitch in the oldwound, the baby shoes dipped in bronze, thetaint in the blood stream. And all times are onetime, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out ofthe shadow their eyes implore us.
âRobert Penn Warren, All the Kingâs Men
âIf a man is forced to choose between the truth and his father, only a fool chooses the truth.â A great writer said that, and for a long time I agreed with him. But put into practice, this adage could cloak almost any sin. My mother would agree with it, but I doubt my older sister would, and my fiancée would scoff at the idea. Perhaps we expect too much of our fathers. Nothing frightens me more than the faith in my daughterâs eyes. How many men deserve that kind of trust? One by one, the mentors Iâve most admired eventually revealed chinks in their armor, cracks in their façades, and tired feet of clayâor worse.
But not my father.
A child of the Great Depression, Tom Cage knew hunger. At eighteen, he was drafted and served as a combat medic during the worst fighting in Korea. After surviving that war, he went to medical school, then paid off his loans by serving in the army in West Germany. When he returned home to Mississippi, he practiced family medicine for more than forty years, treating some of the most underprivileged in our community with little thought of financial reward. The
