Turning Angel
The second thriller in the New York Times No.1 bestselling series featuring Penn Cage: a man who must face the dark heart of the Deep South – and question everything he believes in…One dead girl. And a town full of secrets…Rape and murder aren’t new to the Deep South, but when the body of a popular high school girl is found dumped in the local river, the whole town of Natchez, Mississippi, is shocked.Penn Cage no longer practises law, but when his best friend Drew is accused of the murder and asks for help, Penn must face the hardest questions of his life:Can he defend Drew against the town, the police and overwhelming evidence?Or could it be true that his friend is a brutal killer who has deceived Penn and everyone else?
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GREG ILES
Turning Angel
Harper
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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2013
Copyright © Greg Iles 2005
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2013 Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
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 author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007546541
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007546657
Version 2018-07-30
Society is an artificial construction, a defense against nature’s power.
Camille Paglia
Table of Contents
The rain kept falling, swelling the creek until it lifted the girl into its muddy flood. She swept down through the town, unseen by anyone as she passed the grassy mounds where three hundred years ago Indians worshipped the sun. She bobbed in the current beneath the Highway 61 bridge, naked and unbloodied, not yet gray, limp as a sleeping child. She rolled with the creek, which wound through the woods toward the paper mill and crashed into the Mississippi River in a maelstrom of brown waves. The girl made this journey alone and unknowing, but soon she would whip the town into another kind of maelstrom, one that would make the river seem placid by comparison.
She never meant to cause trouble. She was a quiet girl, brilliant and full of life. When she laughed, others laughed with her. When she cried, she hid her tears. She was blessed with many gifts and took none for granted. At seventeen, she had already brought honor to the town. No one would have predicted this end.
But then no one really knew her.
Only me.
Some stories must wait to be told.
Any writer worth his salt knows this. Sometimes you wait for events to percolate in your subconscious until a deeper truth emerges; other times you’re simply waiting for the principals to die. Sometimes it’s both.
This story is like that.
A man walks the straight and narrow all his life; he follows the rules, stays within the lines; then one day he makes a misstep. He crosses a line and sets in motion a chain of events that will take from him everything he has and damn him forever in the eyes of those he loves.
We all sense that invisible line of demarcation, like an unspoken challenge hanging in the air. And there is some wild thing in our natures that makes us want to cross it, that compels us with the silent insistence of evolutionary imperative to risk all for a glinting shadow. Most of us suppress that urge. Fear stops us more often than wisdom, as in most things. But some of us take that step. And in the taking, we start down a path from which it is difficult and sometimes impossible to return.
Dr. Andrew Elliott is such a man.
I have known Drew since he was three years old, long before he was a Rhodes scholar, before he went to medical school, before he returned to our hometown of twenty thousand souls to practice internal medicine. And our bond runs deeper than that of most childhood friends. When I was fourteen, eleven-year-old Drew Elliott saved my life and almost lost his own in the process. We remained close friends until he graduated from medical school, and then for a long time—fifteen years, I guess—I saw him hardly at all. Much of that time I spent convicting murderers as an assistant district attorney in Houston, Texas. The rest I spent writing novels based on extraordinary cases from my career, which gave me a second life and time to spend with my family.
