Greg Iles’ THE DEVIL’S PUNCHBOWL is the third installment of his Penn Cage novels.  The first two combined suspense, mystery, and insights into the human condition and the depravity of some.  Iles’ latest continues that trend as Cage, a former Houston prosecutor who returned home to Natchez, MS to raise his daughter Annie after his wife passed away from cancer.  Cage turned to writing and became a successful novelist, but local demands saw him become involved in a major civil rights case, a twisted drug case, and of course a murder investigation.  After witnessing how his hometown had deteriorated he decided to run for mayor and defeated his arch enemy Shad Johnson the sitting District Attorney.  Cage’s hope was to resurrect the city he loves, but after two years in his term he concluded that reforming education and municipal corruption was beyond his power.  His idealism faded as the political reality set in.  The novel opens as Cage meets with an old school friend, Tim Jessup, a recovering drug addict who was working at one of the floating casinos, the Magnolia Queen.  They meet late at night in the town cemetery where Jessup discloses that the casino operators are involved with a number of illegal activities ranging from dog fights, prostitution of underage girls, money laundering, and tax fraud.  This knowledge heightens Cage’s disgust and vows to resign his office.  However, when Jessup turns up dead and his house has been trashed he realizes that he is up against an organization that will kill anyone that gets in the way of their activities.

Cage knows he is up against something or someone that he has few resources of which to confront.  He is uncertain who on the Natchez city police or the county police he can trust.  He turns to his father, Dr. Tom Cage, and a group of paramilitary types led by Don Kelly, an ex-special forces operative in the Marines as well as his cohorts to save his family and pursue justice.  Dr. Cage also brings in Walt Garrity, a former soldier and Texas Ranger, that he had fought with during the Korean War to assist his son.  Cage also has worked with Danny Kelly, a former army special ops in Afghanistan who brings his Blackwater type organization with him to assist the mayor of Natchez since he cannot trust his own law enforcement apparatus.  The reader enters the casino world with its ancillary activities of money laundering, dog fighting, and political control, and if anyone threatens their agenda they seem to disappear if they stand in the way of what they are trying to achieve.  People like Seamus Quinn and his boss Jonathan Sanders are the epitome of ruthless operatives of which Cage must contend.  Included in this menagerie of criminals is Edward Po a Chinese corporate type who seems to be in charge, but is also a target of the Department of Homeland Security as represented by Special Agent William Hull.  Ile’s has strong opinions of the plight of the southern gulf coast and those individuals and groups, be it Asian or American who threaten to destroy his tranquil southern lifestyle.  Ile’s is also concerned about the educational bureaucracy that exists in his home state of Mississippi and its negative effects on the state’s future.   As Cage tries to deal with the situation characters from his previous books reemerge, i.e. Caitlin Masters the newspaper publisher and a woman he lived with for five years; Police Chief Don Logan, and the network of individuals that Cage worked with when he was a prosecutor in Houston.

One aspect that Iles’ introduces in his writing is the history of Natchez over the last century and how it impacts the current situation.  It gives the reader insights into southern culture and the accepted way of doing things.  For Penn Cage his frustration with the existing American legal system is something he is about to give up on.  The book also provides a window to international organized crime, particularly the Chinese variety and the strategies employed by the American justice system.  This is the third book in the Penn Cage series and is by far the best one.  Ile’s has the ability to grab the reader’s attention from the outset, and if you decide to read any of his work make sure you have set aside enough time for the task because once you become involved in the plot line it will be very difficult to put the book down.

Penn Cage returns in Greg Iles’ novel TURNING ANGEL.  Five years have passed since Cage solved a civil rights case that dated back to the 1970s and he has settled into his new life as an author in Natchez, MS.  Cage a former prosecutor in Houston is a widower and the father of a young girl.  Now a successful author he finds himself a pillar of the community serving on the St. Catherine’s School Board among other official duties.  The story begins at a School Board meeting when the school secretary informs the board that one of their students, Kate Townsend has been found dead where St. Catherine’s Creek washes into the Mississippi River.  Townsend, a 17 year old senior, valedictorian, and athlete had won a scholarship to Harvard and now is the center of a murder investigation that will rock the Natchez community.

Dr. Andrew Elliot is the leading physician in Natchez with a stellar reputation, and like his friend Cage very involved in the community.  After the body is found he asks his friend to be his lawyer.  It seems that Elliot, entrapped in a poor marriage was having an affair with Townsend and was being blackmailed as he wanted to keep that information quiet.  Further, it was Elliot who had found the body and had intimate relations with Townsend two days before the murder.  It turns out that Townsend was pregnant and that her mother knew about the affair and did not disapprove.  Penn takes on the case and is up against Shad Johnson, the black District Attorney who is no friend of Cage since he believed that five years earlier he had cost him election as Natchez’s mayor.  At this time, the current mayor has resigned and a new election must take place within forty five days.  Johnson sees the prosecution of a rich white physician as a way to reassert his bonifides with the black community and assure himself the mayor’s office.  From this point on the novel which has already engrossed the reader gathers further steam.

Many of Iles’ characters from his previous Penn Cage novel are major players in TURNING ANGEL, particularly Shad Johnson who has his own personal political agenda and is a thorn in Cage’s side.  A number of new ones emerge that are critical to the story.  One of which is Quentin Avery, an elderly lawyer who suffers from diabetes.  When Cage realizes that he is too close to his friend’s case he hires Avery who agrees to defend Elliot because of his disdain for Johnson and other personal reasons.  Employing Avery as his mouthpiece, Iles’ views on black civil rights leaders emerges.  He sees a crisis in black leadership and breaks down that leadership into a number of interesting categories.  In today’s climate of racial tension with Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore, MD, and events in New York, Iles’ comments are important. He points to a managerial type who pretend that race is not an issue.  These individuals want a large white constituency, but also want to keep blacks loyal to them.  They tend to be pragmatic and want blacks to join mainstream society.  Then you have the black protest leader that is loud and proud that want personal status and power, i.e., Louis Farrahkan and Al Sharpton.  They tap into an emotional appeal and can be dangerous.  The last category he terms the “prophetic leader” who relies on intellect, someone like President Obama.  The jury is still out whether any of these types can be successful, however, thus far their success rests on the pervasiveness of mass market culture and the failure of the black middle class.  Throughout the novel the plight of the black community in the south is ingrained in the plot and provides insights into all aspects of southern society.

Another theme that pervades the novel is the drug crisis in America’s schools.  Iles is a very competent chronicler of events as they relate to the use of heroin, pain killers and ecstasy.  By weaving the drug scenario throughout his story he is trying to educate his readers about this crisis and that something must be done to make our schools safe.  A lesser theme that Iles explores that emerges in detail toward the novel’s conclusion is that of the Yugoslavian civil war of the 1990s.  Though briefly presented its horror still lives on in Croatia, Serbia and throughout the Balkans.  Overall, Iles writes in exquisite detail that allows the reader to feel they are personally witnessing the action in the story.  This is my second Penn Cage novel and I look forward to reading the other three.  Iles is the type of writer that hooks his reader in the first few pages and does not let them go even after the book is completed.

(Mansion in Natchez, MS)

Greg Iles is a prolific novelist with many successful books to his credit.  Since the QUIET GAME is my first foray into his world of fiction that holds tremendous historical resonance, I was trying to place him among the novelists I am familiar with.  I have come to the conclusion that tinges of John Grisham and Pat Conroy are present in his work.  Though these similarities may be present, Iles has a sharp pen, loaded with human emotion that easily galvanize the reader.  This approach is present in his first Penn Cage novel, THE QUIET GAME.  Cage a successful Houston lawyer and prosecutor, in addition to being a bestselling author returns to his hometown of Natchez, Mississippi and his parents’ home to try and overcome the grief he and his young daughter Anna are coping with since the passing of his wife and the child’s mother.  Almost immediately he is confronted with his own past, and that of Natchez.

First, in 1968, Del Payton, then employed in the Battery Plant in town was murdered in a parking lot when a bomb exploded as he entered his automobile.  Once a friend of the martyred civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, Payton was a voter registration organizer at the time of his death, making him a threat to the local powers that be.  Second, Penn’s father divulges a family secret that years before his Aunt Ellen had been harassed, raped, and beaten by her ex-boyfriend.  Before learning this, Penn’s father, a doctor in Natchez had loaned a 38 pistol to a former policeman, Ray Pressley.  Later, Penn’s father learns that Pressley had killed his sister’s tormentor with that same gun.  A third strand that Iles weaves into his story is Judge Leo Marston, who years before as District Attorney tried to ruin Dr. Penn’s medical practice with a bogus malpractice prosecution.  Though acquitted, Dr. Penn suffered a heart attack that almost ruined his career.

When Penn returns to Natchez he is approached by Del Payton’s widow to try and obtain justice for her dead husband who was killed thirty years earlier.  Since the FBI and the local police did little to try and uncover who had committed the murder she approached Penn.  After some trepidation, that will turn out to be totally warranted, Penn takes the case and in seeking to uncover the truth he learns that Judge Marston probably bears some responsibility for Payton’s murder and Presley, dying of cancer may have planted the bomb.  Iles integrates all three strands and ties them together in creating an intriguing exploration of 1960s Mississippi politics and its relation to Washington, D.C., in addition to southern society and politics that should be an anathema today. Iles creates a series of characters that fit his story line nicely ranging from newspaper heiress, Caitlin Masters, Judge Leo Marston, who represents the evil of the “good old boy” southern power structure, John Portman, an field agent in the 1960s, who thirty years later finds himself Director of the FBI, Livy Marston Sutter, the judges daughter who had a relationship with Penn in high school, Ike Ransom, a tortured black Vietnam veteran who wound up on the Natchez police force, and Dwight Stone, a former FBI agent who is blackmailed from divulging the truth, and many others. The key question in what motivated Payton’s murder; race, political power, money, or all three.  As the novel unfolds and Penn gathers a great deal of damning evidence and moves closer to the truth murders occur and threats become almost routine.

What separates Iles’ approach from other writers is the complexity and layers that he weaves throughout the plot line.  Penn is confronted with an explosive situation when he discovers that the recently approved head of the FBI, a bipartisan congressional choice because of his supposed liberal civil rights record as an agent in Mississippi in the 1960s was in some way linked to Payton’s murder.  Like the pealing of an onion, Penn develops a strategy to force Marston and others to come forward in an effort to bring about justice.  The lies and cover-ups abound and Penn chips away until he is certain of the correct path he should follow.  In a manner that most investigators and lawyers would not chose, Penn risks everything to learn the truth, and the question that comes to the reader’s mind throughout is how far Iles will go in playing with your emotions as the book becomes difficult to put down.  Iles raises many provocative questions throughout the book.  One of the most interesting is why then FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, sealed the case files of the Payton murder using the excuse that it was for national security reasons.  Another question that emerges is the relationship between the FBI and the racial politics in Mississippi throughout the civil rights period.  To learn the answers to these questions and others you will have to read the first installment in Iles’ Penn Cage series, and the reader is in luck because there are four more installments, the most recent, THE BONE TREE was just published.