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The Bone Tree: A Novel
The Bone Tree: A Novel
The Bone Tree: A Novel
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The Bone Tree: A Novel

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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Don’t miss the latest Natchez Burning novel, SOUTHERN MAN

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Greg Iles comes the second novel in his Natchez Burning trilogy—which also includes Natchez Burning and the upcoming Mississippi Blood—an epic trilogy of blood and race, family and justice, featuring Southern lawyer Penn Cage.

Former prosecutor Penn Cage and his fiancée, reporter and publisher Caitlin Masters, have barely escaped with their lives after being attacked by wealthy businessman Brody Royal and his Double Eagles, a KKK sect with ties to some of Mississippi’s most powerful men. But the real danger has only begun as FBI Special Agent John Kaiser warns Penn that Brody wasn’t the true leader of the Double Eagles. The puppeteer who actually controls the terrorist group is a man far more fearsome: the chief of the state police’s Criminal Investigations Bureau, Forrest Knox.

The only way Penn can save his father, Dr. Tom Cage—who is fleeing a murder charge as well as corrupt cops bent on killing him—is either to make a devil’s bargain with Knox or destroy him. While Penn desperately pursues both options, Caitlin uncovers the real story behind a series of unsolved civil rights murders that may hold the key to the Double Eagles’ downfall. The trail leads her deep into the past, into the black backwaters of the Mississippi River, to a secret killing ground used by slave owners and the Klan for over two hundred years . . . a place of terrifying evil known only as “the bone tree.”

The Bone Tree is an explosive, action-packed thriller full of twisting intrigue and deadly secrets, a tale that explores the conflicts and casualties that result when the darkest truths of American history come to light. It puts us inside the skin of a noble man who has always fought for justice—now finally pushed beyond his limits.

Just how far will Penn Cage, the hero we thought we knew, go to protect those he loves?

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateApr 21, 2015
ISBN9780062311146
Author

Greg Iles

Greg Iles has spent most of his life in Natchez, Mississippi. His first novel, Spandau Phoenix, was the first of many New York Times bestsellers. His Natchez Burning trilogy continued the story of Penn Cage, the protagonist of The Quiet Game, Turning Angel, and #1 New York Times bestseller The Devil’s Punchbowl. Iles’s novels have been made into films and published in more than thirty-five countries. He is a member of the lit-rock group The Rock Bottom Remainders, lives in Natchez with his wife, and his three children.

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Rating: 4.162587244755245 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I finished Natchez Burning with sense of excitement over what was to come. Iles ended that book on a high note, with the kind of climax that leaves you breathless. I couldn't wait to see what Penn would find himself involved in once I started The Bone Tree. I admit that I've found a bit of a soft spot in my heart for Penn Cage and his little family. They have so much passion for doing the right thing, even when it's dangerous, that it's intoxicating.

    So, it was a little disappointing that I didn't love this book as much as the first. I didn't feel that same sense of urgency, where I had to read at a rapid pace to keep up with the action. Where I praised the first book for avoiding the dreaded info dump, The Bone Tree didn't seem to take that same road. While the premise here is fascinating, tying all the way back into the JFK assassination, the only way to keep that story line going is to throw down a ton of historical knowledge. There are dense portions of explanation into histories of past characters, and how they tie into the ones we are dealing with today. It does slow things down.

    Now, on a happy note, there's definitely the same amount of attention to detail that there was in the first book. Newly introduced characters are rich, and have deep history surrounding them. Which comes in handy, especially the further that things delve into the past. Natchez, as well as its surrounding cities, gets the same kind of love that it did before. The setting here has its own kind of special magic, managing to set it apart from the rest of the world in a way. It's like a place set back in time, and it makes for an excellent jumping off point into Penn's newest adventure.

    The action here is just as fast paced as before, putting Penn and his family in the face of danger at every turn. I swear, I've never simultaneously wanted to cheer on and punch a character as often as I have during these books. There are some decisions made that, had I been able to, I would have smacked some of these characters for. The only downside to this particular book is that some of the action feels forced. Like it was put there simply to pick up the pace after a long dialogue or back story portion. The Bone Tree flowed, but just not as beautifully as its predecessor.

    So, it comes down to the fact that I think The Bone Tree suffers from "middle book syndrome". It's the mid point in this particular story arc, and there's a lot packed into it because of that. It just unfortunately doesn't read as smoothly as the first in the series. The good news is that there's enough here, and the ending is solid enough, that it doesn't keep me from wanting to move on with the series. I'm still really excited to see what happens next.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Very gripping; some great scenes, esp towards the end. I didn't expect it to seems as it did.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The Bone Tree by Greg Isles is a 2015 William Morrow Publication. For two years, this book has languished in my TBR pile. I have started reading it on three different occasions, and abandoned it all three times, for many reasons- the main one being that these books are usually pretty dense, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. It just not the type of book you can read on autopilot, and since the book is so long, I decided to wait until I could give it the attention it deserves. However, now that the latest book in the saga has been released, I finally found myself feeling up to the challenge of tackling this one. This book can not be read as a stand alone. So, for those who have not read the previous installments, it is definitely worth your while to do so. For those who have been following along, brace yourselves!! As one might expect, the book starts off being centered around the death of Viola, Tom Gage’s one time nurse and possibly his mistress, many years ago. Tom has been accused of her murder and is on the run. Meanwhile, Caitlyn is in search of the ‘Bone Tree’, and nothing will get in her way, despite the risks. Penn is searching for his father, trying to keep his mother and daughter safe, and looking to make sense of the newly revealed information concerning the JFK assassination and his father’s role in it. This is a very busy book, well thought out and plotted, with some very interesting and very detailed JFK conspiracy theories that one might even buy into if this wasn’t a work of fiction. There are a few shock and awe moments, but while I normally understand Isles’ writing style, there were several chunks of the novel that turned out to be repetitive and mostly unnecessary and upset the flow and pacing, which really tempted me a time or two, to skip ahead because the story seemed stuck or had stalled. In the end, the story took on an unexpected tone and veered off onto a different path than where we started out. The JFK theories are very prominent, and while Viola's murder is weaved around that, and many burning questions were answered, it wasn't the main attraction, and there are still questions left unexplored which I am sure the next book will answer. There are some developments that took me totally by surprise, and I am really, really curious how Penn and his father are going to worm their way of the jam they find themselves in by the book’s end. Overall, this book is quintessential Greg Isles, with a thick southern atmosphere, lots of historical speculation, high drama and action, and packed with emotional turmoil, leaving you holding your breath with a hand over your heart. There is a lot more I would like to say, but will wait to read the last installment before expounding further on some the surprising developments that took place in this novel. Overall, this installment was not as tightly constructed as the previous chapters, but this is still an exceptional addition to the saga!! 4 stars
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Attention! The Bone Tree is the second book of a trilogy within a series* and should not be read if you haven’t first read Natchez Burning, the previous book in the Penn Cage series by Greg Iles. The Bone Tree begins immediately where Natchez Burning leaves off, with the flames from the last chapter of that book still burning and the sound of approaching sirens heard in the distance.Review: 3 ½ starsReaders who have read Natchez Burning will know that Penn and his fiancée, Caitlin Masters, have teamed up with Henry Sexton, a crusading journalist for a weekly newspaper, to take on the Golden Eagles, a KKK splinter group responsible for a long string of murders dating back to the 1960s. In the process, they ran afoul of Forrest Knox, a corrupt Louisiana State Patrol colonel who is poised to take command of all state police forces. Working together with well-funded investors and a black-ops SWAT team that he commands, Knox has taken advantage of the chaos Katrina wrought to rebuild the city as they want it. Their plan is “to raze the Lower Ninth Ward and demolish the housing projects elsewhere, then put up new developments for their kind of people.” At this point in the story I have to wonder whether Iles is making this up or if he is describing what he believes actually happened after Katrina. He clearly believes it possible as he described his neighboring state with Faulknerian style. “A wise man once said that any territory colonized by the French eventually settled into a state of lassitude and corruption. As regards to Louisiana…the state decayed as steadily as an old whore working the darkest den in Marseilles.”I have long enjoyed Greg Iles books and especially like his Penn cage series. I like the main characters, especially Penn and his father, Dr. Tom Cage. Both represent the quintessential southern gentleman, fighting for truth and justice with a dogged determination that would make Atticus Finch proud. The villains are unreservedly evil and the dangers the heroes face are thrilling and all too realistic. I was especially thrilled to learn that Henry Sexton’s character is based on reporter Stanley Nelson, the actual editor of the Concordia Sentinel, a 5,000-circulation newspaper in Ferriday, Louisiana, whose brave crusade to bring justice to the victims of the civil rights abuses of the past cracked the Silver Dollar Group, the inspiration for the Double Eagles. What I like most about Iles’ books is his knowledge of and appreciation for Southern Literary culture. For every one of his book that I’ve bought over the years, there is another book that I bought that I learned about in his books. I first encountered my favorite biography, ‘Huey Long’ by T. Harry Williams, on the shelved of Tom Cage’s library. Other books by William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, William Alexander Percy and Ernest J. Gaines have made their way from Tom Cage’s library to my own.On the down-side, my biggest complaint of Iles’ books is the sheer size of them. The first two books of the trilogy already total over 1,600 pages so it’s safe to say it will be close to 2,500 pages by the time it is finished. If the plot was tighter, I wouldn’t mind but that isn’t always the case. Countless chapters are spent covering the same ground over and over again, with page after page describing tedious hand-wringing about what will happen if they do this or that. In addition, some characters (Penn’s father Tom Cage in particular) act in manners that defy all reason and in fact cause much unnecessary suffering and death. There are few things in books or movies that infuriate me more than when supposedly smart people do incredibly stupid things for no other reason than to make the author’s life easier. I have to admit that I have doubts about the direness of their situation and often find myself thinking “Wait a minute! Why don’t they just fill in the blank)” , then shaking my head and go back to reading. The bottom line is that, despite their length and often plodding pace, Greg Iles books are fun to read. I’m sure that when the third book comes out I will read, or at least listen to it. Even so, I really hope that Greg Iles will pick up the pace a bit with his finale.*The Bone Tree is the fifth book in the Greg Iles’ series featuring the trials and tribulations of Penn Cage, district attorney turned novelist turned Mayor of Natchez, Mississippi. The entire story is best read in order, starting with The Quiet Game and continuing with Turning Angels and The Devil’s Punchbowl. Natchez Burning, The Bone Tree and an upcoming sixth book, Unwritten Laws make up the Double Eagle Trilogy that, as mentioned previously really need to be read in order.**Quotations are cited from an advanced reading copy and may not be the same as appears in the final published edition. The review book was based on an advanced reading copy obtained at no cost from the publisher in exchange for an unbiased review. While this does take any ‘not worth what I paid for it’ statements out of my review, it otherwise has no impact on the content of my review.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Bone Tree by Greg Iles is a very highly recommended riveting and epic Southern Gothic mystery/thriller. This is the second book in the trilogy that started with Natchez Burning and the fifth book featuring Penn Cage. Read Natchez Burning and then you will have to read The Bone Tree and Mississippi Blood, which is due to be released in March 2017. In Natchez Burning Penn Cage and his fiancée Caitlin Masters barely survived an attack by Brody Royal and the murderous KKK faction called the Double Eagles. Now, in The Bone Tree, Tom Cage is still on the run, hiding from the evil Forrest Knox, who is trying to take the reins of the state police’s Criminal Investigations Bureau, and his uncle, Snake Knox, the de facto leader of the Double Eagles. Penn, who just wants to find his father and get him to safety, is doing everything he can to shake up the Knox family.Caitlin, however, is still chasing what could be the biggest story of her career, solving murders that were committed decades before and still happen today. She wants to search for the bone tree. The bone tree is a huge old cypress tree that is hollow in the middle. It is growing way-back, hidden in the swamp, and rumors about it have been quietly shared for years. It is called the bone tree because there are layers of bones inside the hollow space. Some are animals, but many are human, put there purposefully to hide their murder.FBI Special Agent John Kaiser has evoked the Patriot Act to charge the Double Eagles as a domestic terrorist organization so he will have jurisdiction over them. He knows they are responsible for numerous civil rights hate crimes over the years. The question he really wants answered is are these men, and those they worked with in the 1960's somehow involved in the assassination of JFK?Iles continues to impress me with his incredibly details and skillful writing, intricate and complex plot twists, and well-developed characters. All of this is combined with nail-biting suspense. Really, everything I said in my review of Natchez Burning still applies to The Bone Tree:"This is a tale of illegal activities, racism, greed, murder, corruption, and brutality, as well as the different legacies a family may be passing on to the next generation. Penn must decide if he will choose his father or truth. Penn is a crusader at heart, one who wants to right wrongs, but what if the wrongs involve his father, or result in his father's death?"Incredible, rich, vivid, descriptive writing highlight this fast-paced, engrossing thriller. You need to realize that there are some very vivid descriptions of violent acts in Natchez Burning, but they are also crucial to the plot. Iles does an remarkable job allowing the facts and secrets to slowly emerge as characters uncover the monumental truth of the past and the present, piece by piece, and realize how far-reaching the gross injustices reach. The character development is phenomenal. Iles has created characters that are memorable, complex, flawed, and totally believable."I will admit that The Bone Tree seemed to read a bit slower than Natchez Burning, but I totally accept this as a symptom of it being the second book in a trilogy - it's the middle of the story. But if this page-turner is the middle, then what on earth is going to happen in Mississippi Blood? I may need to take a few days off when it is released just to read it asap.Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from HarperCollins and TLC for review purposes.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A book club forces us to read the whole trilogy of Greg Iles, and yes, we will be reading the final installment in 2017. I probably enjoyed the second book more than the first book. Both books provide a reading marathon that lasts longer than most television marathons. Greg Iles explains too much, at times; but leaves you hanging in the last chapter. The bad guys still dominant the story, and never seem to waiver in their evil ways. The theories on the assassination of John F Kennedy provide food for the fodder. Iles presents strong characters that either inspire loathing or admiration. Penn Cage, the main character, does not hold either interest or abhorrence for me, but I like many of the minor characters. The setting and plot anchor and enhance the story, but about 200 pages of too much description.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    WOW, What a story!! The title is odd but you will see why as you read the book. In fact if I didn't know it was fiction, I could believe there was a conspiracy of MASS portions! I was riveted as I couldn't stop reading
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is the second book of the Matchez Burning trilogy. Penn Cage is still trying to find out the truth about his father and his involvement with the Murder of his former nurse. As Penn gets closer to solving the case, his fiancé, Caitlin, uncovers the truth of unsolved civil rights murders which leads her to the notorious Bone Tree. This is a riveting and rewarding read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is the 2nd part of a trilogy, with the first book being Natchez Burning. I tried reading The Bone Tree when I hadn't read Natchez Burning and realized I was missing too much detail and background so I read Natchez first then moved on to The Bone Tree. I've read and enjoyed several of Greg Iles books in the past and with the first two books (more than 1600 pages) of this trilogy, he has outdone himself. This is an epic saga with a huge, diverse cast of characters and action on almost every page. Don't let the length of these books scare you away - the pages fly by. I am now eagerly awaiting the third book. Highly recommend.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book is a continuation of the Penn Cage series. I was introduced to this series, and to the author, with his last book Natchez Burning, the fourth in the series.In The Bone Tree, former attorney and current mayor of Natchez Penn Cage continues his battle for justice, and struggles to keep his family safe while going head-to-head with the Double Eagles, an off-shoot of the KKK. Penn and his fiance Caitlin know things about the Double Eagles-- crimes they have committed over the decades, including rape, kidnapping, torture and murder-- and the Double Eagles will go to any extreme to prevent them from bringing their deeds to light.I became a fan of the author with his last book, and nothing has changed this time around. His writing is so effortless, his characters well developed. His transitions between characters flows easily. There is action and drama to keep you reading.My final word: After Natchez Burning, and now The Bone Tree, I'll read anything by Greg Iles! He holds my interest every moment-- and that isn't an easy thing to do! He is one of the few authors who can make me eager to read an 800 page novel! If you like crime dramas, historical fiction centered around the civil rights era, and books about the deep south, dive into this one with both feet. Greg Iles knows how to weave a great yarn!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Former prosecutor Penn Cage and his fiancée, reporter and publisher Caitlin Masters, have barely escaped with their lives after being attacked by wealthy businessman Brody Royal and his Double Eagles, a KKK sect with ties to some of Mississippi’s most powerful men. But the real danger has only begun as FBI Special Agent John Kaiser warns Penn that Brody wasn’t the true leader of the Double Eagles. The puppeteer who actually controls the terrorist group is a man far more fearsome: the chief of the state police’s Criminal Investigations Bureau, Forrest Knox.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I absolutely love Greg Iles. i think he is a great author, using words and images to fluidly create a beautiful story. This novel, however, was a little painful. It's still well-written, but it's too much. There's a lot of running around and not much gets accomplished. I felt the story was less-organic and more manipulated. Whoever helps Mr. Iles with the Southern literature references should be commended, and Mr. Iles knowledge of the South just by living there is spot on. I think the novel (in fact, the trilogy) could have been culled more to a more management and tight story. I'll still read book three, but I wish the story had been "tighter."
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A rip-roaring ride, full of as many twists and turns as it is violence. Not quite the equal of "Natchez Burning," the first book in a three-part series, but still a heck of a read. Iles and his main character, Penn Cage, have become personal favorites.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Like many other readers, I enjoyed "Natchez Burning," and wanted to learn what happened to the characters.' "The Bone Tree" carries on the story and gives the reader a second installment of an epic trilogy.The novel features a mixture of real and fictional characters, during the story, we read of events with Fidel Castro and Lee Harvey Oswald.The central character is Penn Cage, "Mr. Mayor." He is an attorney and was formerly a district attorney in Houston. To Penn, family is the most important element. When his wife, Sarah, died at a young age, it brought Penn and his little daughter, Annie, close together. In fact, it is Annie who feels protective about Penn.Penn's father, Dr. Tom Cage, has been in medical practice for nearly fifty years. In the deeply segregated town of Natchez, Mississippi, he treats everyone alike. He's even helped a number of black patients who were being sought by members of the Klan. Dr. Cage He's loved by many of his patients and, being a former combat medic in Korea, he doesn't back down from a fight.Penn is engaged to Caitlin Masters, the editor of "Natchez Examiner." She's recently discovered that she's expecting a child but that doesn't slow her down in seeking a good story.The Double Eagles is a breakaway KKK group. They're made up of a number of vicious men who are militant separatists. The have a past they would like to remain hidden and don't like Penn and Caitlin digging into past murders in Natchez.Tom Cage is on the run from the police because he's accused of killing his former nurse, Viola Thomas. She is dying of cancer and came back to Natchez to die. Her son, a disbarred attorney from Chicago, accuses Tom of murder and, as a result, the legal authorities are looking for Tom.Beneath everything else was the Double Eagle plan to assassinate JFK. Not to give away plot, but the FBI is looking into this part of the story.Gres Isles is a story teller above all else. He's able to weave the segments of this novel together into a suspenseful plot. I enjoyed the story and the chase for the evidence about these former Klan members.It's also a timely story in that the black community is treated like second class citizens and the crimes against them are often ignored.At over 800 pages, I felt the story could have benefitted from tightening up the plot and not having so many details and fillers about JFK and RFK and their dislike for a New Orleans Mob figure and their desire to deport this crime lord.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Bone Tree By: Greg Iles Pages. 816Publisher: William Morrow & CompanyCopy Courtesy of Librarything Early ReaderReviewed by: tkNo one is spared the touch of evil that men can do!From the brilliant mind of Greg Iles comes a captivating continuation of the “Natchez Burning”. He will take you deeper in the Mississippi and Louisiana back woods and swamps with more murder and mayhem. Immediate love of any and all characters within will leave you either in tears of frustration, or anger beyond a humans ability to control. The plot thickens…the twists and turns will keep the pages flying. The reaching of the entwining families into the innocent and much more guilty are the same for some members. While others must stand aside to save their own lives , and protect their loved ones.Having received this book as an ARC…once I seen the cover and read the reviews I just had to stop and acquire a copy of “Natchez Burning”. I wanted to start from the beginning. This can be read as a stand alone novel, but you would be leaving yourself short of this amazing story. If you are looking for a trilling ride…take yourself inside this world of the deep south in 1964. You will be wanting so much more that you hope the story never ends.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The Bone Tree is a huge undertaking with over 800 pages of a story that deals with digging up the past of civil rights in the South. Although, the story is fictional, there are factual incidents and historical figures used to further the story (such as JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald) . This is the second novel in a trilogy of stories involving Penn Cage and his life in the Mississippi town of Natchez. The plot is complicated and there are a lot of twists and such. Not having read the first novel, the beginning of this one was slow but as I continued it began to move and make sense. The charters are colorful and interesting. This is both suspenseful and emotional, but long…
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    If you had read the previous books, you know what to expect. If you had not - please stop now, go read them first (especially "Natchez Burning") and then come back and read this one. "The Bone Tree" is the continuation of "Natchez Burning", starting exactly where the first book finished. Deep in the South, masterly done and executed. If you expected the murder mystery that was at the backbone of the previous book to be resolved, you will be disappointed - this is left for the last book in the trilogy. But a lot happens in this book (and with so many of the main characters older than 70, you will be surprised just how action filled the book actually is). If previous books just hinted at the connection to the Kennedy assassination, this one goes full throttle and play the "what if". The scary part is that the what if sounds like something that might have been (nope, I am not buying all the crazy theories out there). By the end of the book we loose good people, we loose bad ones, Penn gets himself in more messes than you would expect and the stage for the final is set. It is Iles at his best. Highly recommended (after you read the previous books).
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I just could not get into this book and that was so disappointing because I have thoroughly enjoyed all of his other books. I attempted to read it a couple of times and still no luck. The action just wasn't there for me. I would not say don't give it a try-especially if you have read Natchez Burning (which I really enjoyed) as this is a sequel to it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Bone Tree, book 2 in the trilogy by Greg Iles, picks up where Natchez Burning left off. This book is about white supremacy, murder, love, family and corruption of law enforcement. Other people have already given you the premise of these books in better detail and so I am just going to tell you that words cannot express the intrigue that continues throughout the book. I fail to understand how one man can write an 800+ page book and keep our interest peeked 24/7. I ate, slept and breathed this book for the 5 short days I read it. Personally I think it's better than the first book and I can honestly say that there wasn't one word wasted! The problem with reading this book is that now I have to wait and earthly long time for next one! I am giving it 5 stars and if you check out other books I have read you will see that I do not give 5 stars very often. Enjoy!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A brilliantly written historical fiction novel about the segregation problems within the south during the 60's, reading about the corruption that lied within these communities was heartbreaking to the core. Hidden within the overall plot were the analogies that Greg Iles uses towards the JFK assassination keeps the readers mind drifting in another direction, but not so far as to loose your focus on the main issue.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Bone Tree by Greg Iles is his fifth Penn Cage novel and the second in the trilogy. Due to The Bone Tree being the second installment of a trilogy, I highly recommend reading Natchez Burning prior to reading this extraordinary book. The Bone Tree begins where Natchez Burning (the 4th Penn Cage novel) left off, making this a difficult book to review without any spoilers. In Natchez Burning readers left Mayor Penn Cage, a former prosecutor and his fiancée, reporter Caitlin Masters, barely escaping the reach of Brody Royal, as well as the Double Eagles, a faction of the KKK with deep ties into some extremely wealthy an influential people in Mississippi. While in the first installment of the trilogy readers we given a lot of back story as well as seeing Dr. Tom Cage, Penn’s father, being brought up on murder charges and then fleeing the jurisdiction to tend to his own affairs, in the second part of the trilogy the danger is ramped up even higher as FBI Special Agent John Kaiser informs Penn that Brody never was the true leader of the Double Eagles, rather the man to be feared is the chief of the state police’s Criminal Investigations Bureau, Forrest Knox. The Bone Tree is even more atmospheric and suspenseful than Natchez Burning as Caitlin works to uncover the truth of the civil rights murders as well as uncovering the whole organization, meanwhile Penn works to protect his family as well as prove his father’s innocence. As with the first book in the trilogy, The Bone Tree is full of intertwining and complex stories filled with richly drawn characters in a deeply atmospheric setting and if that is not enough, Iles’ writing is outstanding and as one would expect, his story is not straight forward, but filled with plot twists, numerous secrets many going far into the past of American History in the deep south. My only complaint is that I could not put the book down and now must wait quite some time for the conclusion to the trilogy. While The Bone Tree offered up many answers, it also lead to many more questions and I anxiously await the final book in the trilogy. I highly recommend both Natchez Burning and The Bone Tree to every reader who enjoys intense and twisty plots, excellent back-stories, and action packed suspense.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    devoured Natchez Burning, the first book in Greg Iles's planned trilogy and have been eagerly awaiting the second entry - The Bone Tree.The Bone Tree picks up right where Natchez Burning left off. Iles does a great job of quickly recapping, so that new readers could jump into the book. (But seriously, you need to read the first book)Lawyer Penn Cage is the mayor of Natchez, Mississippi. Between himself, his newspaper editor fiancee, his father Tom and others, they have uncovered and exposed the dirty underbelly of Natchez and surrounding Louisiana. Secrets, killings and corruption, racial hatred, greed, crime and political malfeasance of the worst kind imaginable. The perpetrators are so well placed and have been in power for so long that it seems nothing can take them down. And then comes the revelation that this shadowy group may have been responsible for the deaths of American leaders. (Gentle readers be warned - there are graphic scenes and descriptions)Iles's plotting is simply spectacular - intricately imagined and complexly drawn with a hefty dose of (frightening) fact mixed in. I did check out many many references online to see if they were real - they were. In fact it's almost impossible to try and explain the book - there are so many threads and characters. Each and every character Iles brings to the page is fully developed and the reader can't help but become engaged (or disgusted) with every player. I've been a fan of Penn Cage from the first book, but Tom and his old ranger buddy Walt were the underdogs I was cheering for this time. The 'bad guys' are well - just plain ugly.I described Natchez Burning as powerful, gripping, thrilling, sweeping and simply spectacular - and I'll use those same words to describe The Bone Tree. 800+ plus pages of absolutely epic reading. Read an excerpt of The Bone Tree. A reading guide is also available.This reader will be waiting and watching for the third and concluding book. There's no date or title as of yet, but Iles says "The release date of the final book in the trilogy is not set in stone at this time. I have a feeling that the TV series currently in the works might make me let go of that final book faster than I might otherwise have done, which I hope is good news for readers"
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    If you have not read "Natchez Burning", the first book in this trilogy, STOP RIGHT NOW, and read it first. I cannot recall where I read this quote, and I may be only paraphrasing it, but the quote for "Natchez Burning" went something like this: " I opened this book expecting a novel and got literature." I personally read both of these books back to back, and found the Natchez volume to be slightly more exciting than "The Bone Tree". Now, it might be simply that 1600 pages is more than my mind was willing to absorb.I found a few slow spots in "The Bone Tree", none in "Natchez". Almost all of the character development came from "Natchez", and that is one of the reasons I recommend reading that one first, but do read both of these amazing works of fiction.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I did not realize when I picked up this book that it was book two in a series. I have not read Natchez Burning, book one. Having not reading book one, I did suffer a little reading book two. It jumped right into the story a little while after the first book. This was not such the problem for me as I was able to quickly piece together a good idea of what transpired in the first book and who the major key players were from both the good and bad sides. In fact, I had no issues that I got all the way to page 276 before I took a break. This is something as this book is a whopping tome at 816 pages long! My issue was that I could not gain an instant connection with the characters. It took me a while to get this connection. However once I did, I was all in. This is not just a book but a whole production. Mr. Iles knows how to spin a good story. Although if you do not like graphic gore or crude language than take this as your warning.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Bone Tree by author Greg Iles is the second in a trilogy and picks up where the first book, Natchez Burning ended. Penn Cage’s father, Dr Tom Cage is still on the run for the suspected murder of Viola Turner and now that of a state trooper. Penn and his fiancée had only recently escaped from an almost certain death at the hands of Brody Royal, the multi-millionaire backer of the Double Eagles, a violent but powerful splinter group of the KKK. FBI Agent John Kaiser is convinced that Frank Knox, the founder of the Double Eagles, was the real shooter in the JFK assassination and is determined to find the evidence. It has been rumoured for decades that this evidence as well as the bodies of many of the mostly black victims of the Eagles are hidden inside a huge cypress tree in the Lusahatcha Swamp known as the Bone Tree but so far, no one outside of the Eagles or their many supporters has been able to locate it. Despite every effort by Penn and Kaiser to find the truth, the Eagles, now led by Forrest Knox, seem to be one step ahead of them.Coming in at just over 800 pages (just slightly longer than Natchez Burning), The Bone Tree is definitely not a sleepy afternoon’s pleasure but it is well worth the read. Although the story is set in the modern south, it combines historical details and figures of the Civil Rights-era south with many of the conspiracy theories related to the assassination of President Kennedy to produce a tale that is at once compelling and emotionally charged. Its portrait of the racially motivated killings of the old south and the people who committed them is chilling and more so because Iles gives it a real sense of authenticity. That he then puts these same people in positions of power in the present only makes the tale more gripping as the power struggle between these old-line racists and the few who oppose them ramps up. Iles really knows how to build tension and keep the reader completely engaged and invested in the outcome, not just wanting but needing to know the fate of the many characters. The story ends on a bit of a cliffhanger so now we have to wait a bit longer to know the end of the story – probably a good thing because after this roller coaster of a ride, the reader may feel like they need to lie down for a bit.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    It is hard to describe this book. It makes you cry and think and remember what the days were like back in the 60's. It is too bad that it is still bad in places but it is improving every year. I wish the story had ended in this book but I look forward to reading the third in the trilogy. I love the main characters in the story. One also hates some of the main characters also. I received an ebook copy of this book from edelweiss.com for a fair and honest opinion. I had a hrs time putting this book down. I need to know how this turns out.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A special thank you to HarperCollins, William Morrow, and LibraryThing for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.Southern storyteller, Greg Iles continues the powerful and compelling saga of Penn Cage, delivering THE BONE TREE, a hard-boiled explosive multi-layered follow up after sensational Natchez Burning, which landed on my TOP 30 BOOKS OF 2014 Again, Greg does not disappoint his fans, with this complex and emotional conspiracy of greed, power, politics, civil rights, and racial injustice--spanning across history and generations. Let me start by saying, the length of the novel is not intimidating (more to enjoy) as Greg is the “best of the best” of modern literary thriller writers; however, will say I typically listen to Greg’s books via audio, as it captures the full essence, emotion, and suspense-- David Ledoux was outstanding in NB and hoping Robert Petkoff can live up as narrator for TBT. I have pre-ordered the audiobook; however it does not release until April 21, so looking forward to listening for the overall experience. Since I am not a patient person, was thrilled to attain an ARC, and decided to dive in with the book, and listen again later—yes, that good as devoured it in a few days. With the prologue summary, Greg quickly gets readers up to speed as a refresher since last year with Natchez Burning. This was helpful since it has been a while; however, would recommend to readers to read Natchez Burning first to grasp a good understanding of this mesmerizing riveting thriller.Penn’s physician father, Tom is a fugitive suspected of murder and combined with the unsolved civil rights case from the sixties, Double Eagles, and the KKK--- may be linked to assassinations. In Penn’s quest for answers, he is sent into the dark past of conspiracy, greed, and murder involving some powerful, evil, and wealthy men. As he follows this bloody trail from decades past, these guys do not want any stones uncovered--will do anything to keep their dark secrets in the past.Penn, a former prosecutor, now Mayor of Natchez, MS, and his pregnant fiancée, reporter Caitlin Masters, are in the middle of danger with a flamethrower sadist. There are old grudges, hatred, and revenge, and lives are at stake. Caitlin, publisher of the Natchez Examiner is busy trying to track down the bad guys and danger is lurking around every corner. Penn’s dad, Dr. Cage of course has been the target for years regarding some long ago grudge and then there is his former African American nurse, and mistress Viola’s death and her son which may or not be Cage’s son, or could be the rapist’s son. Henry Sexton a fearless journalist has clues which they need to crack. From the Deep South we have the KKK, the Double Eagles, Forest Knox, and Brody Royal – these are some evil bad ass guys, with some dirty dark secrets; and criminal behavior or murder does not phase this group of southern terrorists. Special Agent FBI John Kaiser is the on the case in Natchez, Mississippi and he works his magic in many ways. Caitlin gets closer to learning about the illegal activity surrounding the bone tree and what it represents, putting her in immediate danger. As the plot thickens you will be engrossed in the KKK, RFK, MLK, and JFK connection of racial violence and hatred. As a southern native, and a baby boomer, growing up in the sixties --seems like only yesterday when the teacher came in to inform us of JFK’s assignation. The evil and racial tension, which lurks inside these pages is spellbinding. Greg grabs you with intensity, fear, and emotion surrounding the events which threaten Penn, his daughter, his family, his fiancé, and those he holds dear to his heart. Cage and his supporters are hoping to find the key to old mysteries from nearly 40 years at the legendary “bone tree” deep in the swamps, a giant cypress, where Double Eagles took their victims, mostly black men, women and even children, to be tortured and killed. From the local police, the politicians, and the corrupt calculating feds—Dr. Cage accused of murder and now Penn, Caitlin and a fearless investigative reporter; survival is on the line. Will Penn be pushed to the brink to save his own life and his family? However, can they be stopped or will they die trying? Will Walt Garrity and John Kaiser be able to save him and his family?THE BONE TREE is a multi-layered, richly plotted electrifying account of racial injustice and corruption, making you think twice about the cruelty of the South, clouding the lines between reality and fiction. American History has never been so scandalous! No one does tells it better than Greg Iles- cannot wait for his next book. Southern Fiction at it's FINEST! Congrats! Amazon Books ‘Natchez Burning’ Drama From Tobey Maguire, David Hudgins & Sony TV.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Picking up at exactly the same place that Natchez Burning left off, Greg Iles continues the second book of his trilogy. We heard about the The Bone Tree in the first book and we somehow knew it was to be a big part in what was to come. And it is. But there is so much more in this story playing out over a series of days that feels like lifetimes to us as readers. How long can we hold our breath? How many characters to we need to be concerned for? How many do we continue to loathe? And how many times do we need to put the book down and just walk away for awhile to assimilate and to regain control of our emotions before we go forward?The book is compelling. The detail so complete that I begin to think in this brutal retelling of events in the Deep South and in the country, in the sixties, the author could be rewriting parts of our nations' history. I am looking forward to the final book in the trilogy. Questions are yet to be answered. I just need a little time to decompress from this one.Thank you LibraryThing and Wm Morrow for the ARC.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Picking up where “Natchez Burning” left off, Penn Cage and his fiancé, journalist Caitlin Masters, seek evidence that will clear Penn’s father of the murder charge leveled against him following the death of Viola Turner. But the pair are up against desperate men who will stop at nothing to keep them from learning the truth and exposing the horrific actions resulting from their hatred and corruption.At nearly 800 pages, “The Bone Tree” is as massive as its predecessor, “Natchez Burning.” And like the first volume in this trilogy, readers will be pulled into the action from the very beginning of this riveting page-turner. Guaranteed to keep readers enthralled, the narrative weaves historical fact and fiction into an epic tale filled with danger, excitement, and heartbreak. Highly recommended.[I received a free copy of this book through the LibraryThing Early Readers program.]
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Natchez Burning was one of my favourite books of 2014. I couldn't wait to get my hands on The Bone Tree and it did not disappoint. The action is so intense and crazy I found there were times I had to put the book down in order to take a break from it all. The story of Tom Cage and his brushes with great moments in 1960's history were told well. Some of the decisions made/actions taken by Tom Cage, Penn Cage and Caitlin Masters were sometimes frustrating they made for an amazing thrill ride of a story. There were perhaps some sections that could have done with a little more editing. I think he could have whittled out 100 or so pages to make the story just a bit tighter. I thought this was an excellent continuation of the trilogy. Can't wait to find out how it all ends.

Book preview

The Bone Tree - Greg Iles

PROLOGUE

SPECIAL AGENT JOHN Kaiser stood at the window of the FBI’s tactical room in the River Bend Hotel and stared at the lights of Natchez twinkling high over the dark tide of the Mississippi. After struggling silently with his convictions for more than an hour, he had decided to use the authority granted him under the Patriot Act to take a step that under any other circumstances would have been a violation of the Constitution—the unauthorized invasion of computers belonging to a public newspaper. He had not done this lightly, and Kaiser knew that his wife—an award-winning journalist and combat photographer—would condemn him if she ever learned what he’d done. But by his lights, the deteriorating situation demanded that he cross the Rubicon. And so he’d quietly risen from bed and, without disturbing his wife, slipped down the hall to where two FBI technicians sat behind computers connected by secure satellite to a high-speed data link in Washington.

This is the Deep South, Kaiser reflected, watching the bow lights of a string of barges round the river bend to the north, from Vicksburg, and push slowly southward toward Baton Rouge. The real South. After being stationed in New Orleans for seven years, he’d realized that the Big Easy, while technically a southern city, was in fact an island with a unique identity: a former French possession, deeply Catholic, multiracial, bursting at the seams with joy and pain, corrupt to its decaying marrow. But the farther north you drove out of New Orleans, the deeper you penetrated into the true South, a Protestant land of moral absolutes, Baptist blue laws, tent revivals, fire and brimstone, heaven and hell, good and evil, black and white, and damn little room between.

Natchez on its bluff was a soeurette, a little sister, to New Orleans—not quite as cosmopolitan in this century as it once was, but still an enclave of license and liberality in the hard-shell hinterlands of cotton and soybeans. Yet Natchez had once been the capital of this cotton kingdom, and a hundred years after the Civil War the hatred that simmered in her outlying fields had infected the city, and murder had roamed her streets like a scourge. If you drew a thirty-mile circle around Natchez, it would encompass more than a dozen unsolved murders from the 1960s alone, and twice that number that were officially solved, but begged for deeper investigation.

Kaiser pressed the palm of his hand against the cold windowpane and watched the barge lights through the fog of his breath on the glass. Two days ago, when he’d mobilized a massive FBI corpse-recovery effort here in Concordia Parish, his goals had been to solve some cold case murders and to save the life of a heroic journalist—not to unravel the darkest thread of the Kennedy assassination. But twenty-four hours after his arrival in this embattled parish, that was exactly the position in which he found himself.

Was it possible that a group of long-unsolved race murders in this neglected corner of the South held the key to the biggest cold case in American history? Given what he’d learned in the past twelve hours, it just might be. Texas bordered Louisiana, after all, and in 1963 Dallas had been a fundamentalist redoubt of reactionary political conservatism, seething with rabid Kennedy hatred. More unsettling still, in that era Dallas had been a feudal possession of New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello. For decades, finding a link between Marcello and Dealey Plaza had proved maddeningly elusive. But today new evidence had emerged, revealing a credible plan by the Double Eagle group to assassinate Robert Kennedy in April of 1968 as well as actions by the group’s founder that suggested complicity in the 1963 assassination. Kaiser had long known of a connection between certain Double Eagles and Carlos Marcello. And while he could not explain his certainty, he sensed that the missing links that would tie Marcello to the dead president would soon be within his reach.

Now that Kaiser had authorized an invasion into the computer servers of the Natchez Examiner, his dilemma was how much information to pass up the chain to Washington. In the three months since Hurricane Katrina struck, he had been operating with near-complete autonomy, and he liked it. The breakdown of basic human services in New Orleans—most notably the evaporation of the NOPD—had created a situation of unprecedented chaos on American soil. A veteran of the final phase of the Vietnam War, Kaiser had pushed into that vacuum and deployed Bureau resources with the independence and assertiveness of a military officer, and Washington had allowed him all the rope he desired. The fact that New Orleans lay in a part of the country that the D.C. nabobs never thought much about had been useful in this regard. But Kaiser knew all too well that once he started passing explosive information up the chain, those same bureaucrats would instantly go into ass-covering mode and force his operation to a grinding halt. And almost nothing was more explosive than evidence tying the New Orleans Mafia and a violent offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan to Dealey Plaza.

What Kaiser most wanted was time and freedom to follow the leads he’d unearthed—to wherever they led, unhampered by oversight and regardless of consequences. J. Edgar Hoover might be long dead, but his paranoid ghost still haunted the halls of FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. Already two men had died since Kaiser and his team had driven north from New Orleans to Vidalia, and more had died in the days before that. These deaths had not gone unnoticed in Washington, and by early this evening a few reporters at national newspapers had picked up on the violent doings in the backcountry of Louisiana. None had yet learned that Kaiser had designated the Double Eagle group a terrorist entity under the Patriot Act (which gave him unprecedented power to combat the survivors of the Klan offshoot), but someone soon would, and that would only increase the political pressure to quickly resolve events.

The problem was, Kaiser saw no hope for a quick resolution. The Double Eagle group was tied to at least a dozen unsolved rape, kidnapping, and murder cases in and around Concordia Parish and Natchez, Mississippi. And while Kaiser had made remarkable progress during the past twenty-four hours, it might take weeks or even months to solve them all. The surviving Double Eagles were tough men who had never been compromised, much less infiltrated. Breaking them would be difficult. The one Eagle who had shown signs of wanting to wash his conscience clean—a terminal cancer patient named Glenn Morehouse—had been ruthlessly murdered by his old comrades two days ago, before the FBI even became aware that he’d opened talks with a crusading journalist named Henry Sexton. Sexton himself had nearly perished in a subsequent attack by unknown assailants, and he now lay in a heavily protected room in the nearby Concordia Parish hospital.

It was Sexton’s working files and notes that Kaiser hoped to access by breaching the computers of the Natchez Examiner. Early that morning, Kaiser had learned from Sexton’s girlfriend that the injured reporter had given a bundle of Moleskine notebooks containing the results of years of Double Eagle investigations to Caitlin Masters, the publisher of the Examiner. Kaiser had tried both bribes and threats to persuade Masters to allow him access to those notebooks, but so far she had refused. Just before going to bed, his wife had told him that she’d spoken to Masters (who was a great admirer of her work) about them all being on the same side, and Jordan believed the publisher would allow Kaiser access to the notebooks tomorrow. He’d made up his mind to subpoena Sexton’s records under the Patriot Act in any case. But as he’d lain awake in the dark beside his wife, he’d begun to believe that waiting even eight hours for that information would be a mistake.

Though few knew it, Kaiser had twice today visited Henry Sexton in the hospital, and during the second meeting he’d heard a story that had stunned him. According to Sexton, the 1968 kidnapping of two young black men—Jimmy Revels and Luther Davis—had been anything but a simple racist attack by the Ku Klux Klan. Glenn Morehouse, a founding member of the Double Eagles, had told Sexton that Revels and Davis had been kidnapped as part of a plan to lure Robert Kennedy to Mississippi to be assassinated. This plan had come into being after RFK announced his intention to enter the 1968 presidential race, a decision that had enraged Carlos Marcello, who’d been targeted for deportation multiple times by Kennedy, both as a senator and as attorney general. According to Morehouse, Marcello believed that if Robert Kennedy was elected president, he would be permanently deported and lose his criminal empire, which stretched from Dallas, Texas, to Mobile, Alabama. Through case work of his own, Kaiser knew this to be true.

He did not, however, know anything about the rest of Morehouse’s Kennedy revelation, which was: first, that Marcello had gone through local millionaire and power broker Brody Royal to recruit his assassin; and second, that the assassin was Frank Knox, the founder of the Double Eagle group. Morehouse claimed that Knox had chosen Jimmy Revels as his victim because Revels had worked tirelessly to register black voters for a Kennedy presidential run, and also because Revels was personally known to Bobby Kennedy. The boy had even spoken to the senator by telephone only days earlier. Frank Knox believed that if Revels were brutally murdered, Kennedy would be unable to resist the temptation to travel to Mississippi to attend his funeral. Only the accidental death of Knox during this operation had prevented the assassination plan from coming to fruition. Despite Knox’s death, Revels and his friend Davis had still perished, and horribly. Earlier today, Kaiser’s team had brought up Davis’s bones from a deep pond after thirty-seven years of submersion, proving that at least one of the young men had been handcuffed to the wheel of his Pontiac convertible and driven into the water after being both shot and tortured. Revels’s body remained undiscovered, but Kaiser hoped to find it next—and soon.

The aborted plot to kill Robert Kennedy was not what had triggered Kaiser’s present fears. No, it was something Henry Sexton had told him during their first hospital visit, something Sexton himself had learned from Morehouse only eighteen hours earlier. On the day Frank Knox founded the Double Eagles—during the summer of 1964—Knox had drawn three groups of letters in the sand beside the Mississippi River. "The three K’s," he’d called them: JFK, RFK, MLK. Then Knox had crossed out the JFK and said, One down, two to go. To his stunned followers, Knox had then shown a photo of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. standing in a group in the White House Rose Garden, with red circles drawn around their heads.

After Kaiser heard this, every instinct told him that Carlos Marcello’s approach to Frank Knox about killing RFK in 1968 was not the first time the mobster had gone to the former marine for that kind of help. In 1961 and ’62, Frank Knox had been training Cuban expatriates in a South Louisiana camp funded by Marcello. And in 1963 Marcello had even more reason to believe Robert Kennedy meant to destroy him than he would have in 1968. Given all these factors, Kaiser had come to believe that he was working the most important FBI investigation outside the war on Al Qaeda. In historical terms—given the FBI’s abysmal failure on so many civil rights murders, and Hoover’s sabotaging of the Warren Commission investigation—it might be the most important case of all.

What complicated Kaiser’s effort to redeem the Bureau’s record—and honor—was the fact that the Louisiana State Police were working against him. In a uniquely southern twist, the chief of the LSP’s Criminal Investigations Bureau was the son of Frank Knox. Forrest Knox had worked hard to distance himself from his family’s racist past, and he’d been so successful that many Louisiana politicians supported him as the next superintendent of the state police. For Kaiser, this possibility represented a nightmare. If his suspicions were correct, Forrest Knox was the architect of a statewide criminal organization that used corrupt police officers and ex–Double Eagles to facilitate drug smuggling, gambling, and prostitution—the rackets once ruled by the Marcello organization of old. Whispered rumors that Knox had used a state police SWAT team to wipe out drug competitors during the chaos of Katrina were starting to seem more like fact than fantasy. Worse still, Kaiser had begun to uncover connections between Forrest Knox and the ruthless developers and bankers intent on rebuilding New Orleans as a whiter and more marketable version of itself in the wake of the storm.

I’m almost through, said one of the technicians behind Kaiser. They have better security than I expected. It’s run out of the home office in South Carolina.

John Masters owns twenty-seven newspapers, Kaiser said, the fog of his breath blanking out the glass again. I’d expect him to spend at least some money on information security.

Two minutes, tops, said the tech, tapping rapidly at his keyboard.

Kaiser checked his watch, wondering where Caitlin Masters was at this moment. Almost certainly in her office at the Examiner, working on the next day’s stories, chasing her second Pulitzer. Will she be able to see that we’re inside her system? he asked.

No. No worries there.

Kaiser grunted. He liked Caitlin Masters. Earlier tonight, when a state police captain named Ozan had shown up at the Concordia hospital to take over the Sexton case, the slightly built newspaper publisher had gotten right up into his face to challenge his authority and reaffirm federal jurisdiction. You had to admire spunk like that.

The paternal warmth Kaiser felt toward Masters reflected the conflicts he felt about the overall case, and none was more complex than that he felt about the Cage family. Penn and Tom Cage represented a unique problem for him. Penn Cage was not only Caitlin Masters’s fiancé, but also the mayor of Natchez, a successful novelist, and a former prosecutor from Houston. Even more impressive to Kaiser, Cage had been the primary mover behind the scandal that resulted in the resignation of FBI director John Portman in 1998. While working a cold civil rights murder, Cage had uncovered criminal actions on the part of the young Portman that could not bear modern scrutiny. By any standard, Kaiser saw Cage as a modern-day hero. And yet, in the present circumstance, the mayor was more a pain in the ass than anything else.

The reason for that was his father.

Tom Cage was almost a relic of a bygone era. A former combat medic in Korea, Cage had gone on to practice medicine for nearly fifty years in Natchez, where he’d worked tirelessly for decades to treat the black community with no thought of recognition or reward. Yet paradoxically, this beloved physician’s irrational actions had directly or indirectly triggered every tragedy that had happened over the past three days.

In the wee hours of Monday morning, Viola Turner, Dr. Cage’s sixty-five-year-old former nurse, had died in her sister’s home in Natchez. After living in Chicago for thirty-seven years, the Natchez native had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and returned home to die in the care of her old employer. Few people had known that Dr. Cage was treating Turner, and even if they had, no one would have expected the explosion that followed her death. That only occurred because Turner’s son, a Chicago lawyer, had shown up at the Natchez DA’s office and demanded that Dr. Cage be charged not with euthanasia, but with murder. And because the black district attorney, Shadrach Johnson, had a long history of antipathy for Penn Cage, he had obliged the angry son.

Things might have progressed with some semblance of order had not Dr. Cage jumped bail after being indicted by a grand jury with lightning speed. From what Kaiser could ascertain, the doctor had been aided in this task by an old war buddy, a former Texas Ranger named Walt Garrity. Worst of all, within hours of making their escape, either Cage or Garrity had killed a Louisiana state trooper who’d cornered them near the Mississippi River. Kaiser strongly suspected that the dead trooper had been working for Forrest Knox, not the State of Louisiana, when he’d caught up with the two fugitives, but sadly Kaiser could not prove that.

I’m in! crowed the tech. "I’m looking at the front page of tomorrow’s Examiner."

Let me see, Kaiser said, turning from the window.

Give him your screen, Pete, ordered the tech.

The second tech got up and went over to the coffeemaker. As Kaiser took the warm seat, the first tech said, I routed the front page to you. I’ll keep looking for any mention of Henry Sexton’s notebooks.

With his aging eyes, Kaiser had to tilt his head at exactly the right angle to read what was on the screen, and he could barely make out what the tech was saying on his left. Kaiser had lost nearly all the hearing in that ear two years ago, when a drug dealer holding him hostage on Royal Street in New Orleans had fired off a 9 mm pistol only inches from his ear.

From what Kaiser could see on the screen, Caitlin Masters had led off her story with the true events at the Concordia hospital. Kaiser had hoped to lull the Double Eagles into making a mistake by putting out the story that the Eagles had succeeded in killing Henry Sexton rather than merely wounding him, but the appearance of Captain Ozan at the hospital had seriously lowered the odds of success. He couldn’t blame Masters for printing the truth.

I’ve got a folder! cried the tech. ‘Henrys Moleskines’ is the name. Jesus, do you think—?

She digitized his notebooks! Kaiser cried, his pulse racing. Put the folder on my screen.

Doing it now.

Can we copy the files?

Sure.

Will they know we did it?

If they hire a forensic firm down the road, yes. But not anytime soon. Do you have it?

A cluster of typical Windows folders appeared on Kaiser’s screen. Just click on it? he asked, his right hand tingling as it hung over the mouse.

Sure. Just like your computer.

Kaiser clicked on the folder, but no files opened. I’ve got nothing. Is the folder password protected or something?

Not that I could see.

Kaiser tried twice more, then clicked on Properties. The folder appears to be empty on this screen. Are you sure I have access to the file from here?

You should have access to everything I do. Hang on.

Kaiser waited, fingers twitching. If he could get immediate access to every note that Henry Sexton had taken over decades of investigation, there was no telling what deductive leaps he might make. Plus, despite Sexton’s apparent candor in the hospital, the reporter might have held back critical information, hoping to follow it up himself after he recovered. Kaiser suspected, for example, that Sexton might have some notion of the location of the Bone Tree, a long-rumored dump site for Double Eagle corpses and a killing ground that dated to the pre-Columbian years of the Natchez Indians.

Oh, no, groaned the tech, his voice taut.

I don’t like the sound of that.

Somebody erased the files in that folder.

Just now?

Yep. I can see their tracks. Somebody just deleted the file containing what must have been digital scans of Sexton’s notebooks. There was thirty gigabytes of data in that folder. Now it’s empty. And I think they’re still deleting stuff.

Who the hell would do that? Kaiser demanded, a bubble of panic in his chest.

User 23. That’s all I can tell you.

You can’t tell who User 23 is?

Nope. Sorry.

Shit!

What do you want me to do, boss?

Can you copy their whole server drives? Everything they have?

The tech’s eyes went wide. That’s a lot of data.

That’s not an answer, goddamn it.

It would take a long time. And it would definitely increase the odds of their IT people in Charleston noticing something.

Do it anyway.

Kaiser was trying to think outside the box when his cell phone rang. He expected it to be his wife, asking where he’d gone, but it was one of the agents guarding Henry Sexton at the Concordia hospital.

What is it? he snapped. Is Sexton still stable?

I don’t know, sir.

What do you mean?

Sexton’s not in his hospital bed. I just walked in and found his seventy-eight-year-old mother lying in his place. She’s hooked up to the heart monitors and everything.

What?

She used to be a nurse, apparently. When you gave permission for Henry’s mother to visit him, he got hold of a cell phone and asked her to bring him a few things to help him sneak out. She did, and Henry pulled it off. He walked out of here wearing his mother’s coat and hat. Right past our guards.

Kaiser slammed his hand on the table. Damn it! What else does she know?

We’re trying to find out. But I’ve already learned one thing that’s not good.

What’s that?

One of the things Sexton asked for was a shotgun. And she brought him one.

Kaiser thought fast. Could Henry even drive? He was heavily sedated when I saw him earlier today.

He probably skipped his last doses of meds, except the pain pump.

Did Mrs. Sexton know where he was going with the shotgun?

She claims she doesn’t.

Do you believe her?

The agent paused. Yeah.

Keep her there! You hear me? I’m coming straight over. And put out an APB on her vehicle. The vehicle and Sexton both. Wait—don’t do that. If the state police hear that, they’ll find Henry and kill him before we get close. He’ll just disappear. Tell our guys to hit the streets. Everybody but you. I’ll wake up the troops here.

Got it.

Kaiser clicked END and started to get up, but at that moment his wife touched his shoulder. Jordan Glass was wearing a LEICA T-shirt and sweatpants, but her eyes were glued to the screen in front of Kaiser.

Has Caitlin already posted tomorrow’s edition? she asked. I figured she’d be writing right up to the last possible deadline.

For a moment Kaiser considered lying, but experience had taught him that would come back later and bite him on the ass.

No, he said. We went into their intranet.

Jordan’s gaze slowly moved to him. You didn’t.

I had to see Henry’s notebooks, if I could. Things are happening too fast to wait.

I told you she was going to show them to you tomorrow.

You can’t be sure of that, Jordan.

His wife gave him a look of infinite reproof. "I was sure."

Kaiser endured her gaze as long as he could, out of penance, but then he turned to his techs and said, Wake everybody up, and I mean everybody. We’ve got to find Henry Sexton ASAP.

The Double Eagles murdered the woman he loved earlier this evening, Jordan said. They were gunning for him, and she died in his place. Whoever Henry thinks did that, he’s going to kill them.

Kaiser couldn’t believe this. Henry is the most mild-mannered guy I’ve met in all this.

Everybody has a breaking point, John. You know that.

As Jordan turned to leave, half a dozen phones began to ring.

WEDNESDAY

CHAPTER 1

TONIGHT DEATH AND time showed me their true faces.

We spend our lives plodding blindly through the slaughterhouse gate between past and future. Every second is annihilation: the death of this moment, the birth of this moment. There is no next moment.

There is only now.

While the pace of life seems stately in the living, we funnel through that gate like driven cattle, fearful, obedient, insensate. Even while we sleep, now becomes then as relentlessly as a river wearing away a rock. Cells burn oxygen, repair proteins, die, and replace themselves in a seemingly endless train: yet from the womb, those internal clocks are winding down to final disorder.

Only in the shadow of death do we sense the true velocity of time—while adrenaline blasts through our systems, eternity becomes tangible and all else blurs into background. It is then, paradoxically, that seconds seem to stretch, experience becomes hyper-real, and flesh and spirit unite in the battle to remain breathing, conscious, aware—afloat in the rushing stream of time. If we survive the threat, our existential epiphany quickly fades, for we cannot bear it long. Yet somewhere within us, a dividing line remains.

Before and after.

Tonight time slowed down so much I could taste it like copper on my tongue. I felt it against my skin—dense and heavy—resisting every move. Mortality hovered at my shoulder, a watchful beast of prey. Chained to a cinder-block wall, I watched a man older than my father torture the woman I love with fire. I realized then that hell existed; the terrible irony was that I had created it. In arrogance, against the counsel of others, I’d wagered all I had and more—the lives of others—to try to save my father. In desperation, I cast away every principle he ever taught me and reached into the darkness in the hope of a bargain.

What did I get in exchange for my soul?

A pillar of fire roaring in the night. The pyre of three men, probably more, visible for miles across the flat Louisiana Delta. Probably even from Mississippi. Not far to the east, my town sleeps along the high ground above the river, but here all sense, all logic is suspended while the fire devours the dead. Two of those men gave their lives for Caitlin and me. Henry Sexton, reporter. Sleepy Johnston, musician and prodigal son of Louisiana. One a white man, one black. Allies by chance, or maybe fate. Either way, they’re gone forever.

Through the slaughterhouse gate.

I’ve never witnessed such brutality as that which preceded their deaths, nor such heroism as was displayed in their sacrifices. Yet all I can taste is ashes. Three months ago I felt a lot like this, as a flood of biblical scale swept over New Orleans, the only real city between the Gulf and Memphis. Three hours south of here, hazmat-suited crews are still dragging bodies from mildewed houses. That disaster, like this one, had human causes. Greed, apathy, hubris—even loyalty—all demand payment in the end. Storms will always come, and men will always do evil in the shadow of some other word.

It’s how we respond that defines us.

A FEW MINUTES AGO, gripped by a mad delusion of invincibility, I carried Sleepy Johnston out of the basement inferno where this fire was born, and not once while I staggered through the smoke and flames did I doubt I would reach the surface. I hauled a man nearly my own weight as easily as I would have carried my eleven-year-old daughter—but to no avail. Two minutes after I laid him on the ground, Johnston died of his injuries. Now he lies a few yards behind us, staring sightlessly at the smoke-obscured stars.

I did not pray while Caitlin knelt to ease his passing. Anything I said would have been superfluous, for if any God exists, he must surely fold such martyrs into his embrace. I watched in silence while Caitlin reenacted the oldest ritual in the world, cradling the older man’s head and murmuring maternal reassurance into his ear. Touching my newly scarred face with my right hand, I drove the nails of my left-hand fingers into my palm. Pain is proof of life.

After Johnston expired, I comforted Caitlin as though I had some purchase on reality. But that was only another delusion, though I didn’t know it then.

Then . . . ?

With alarm I realize that these events happened only a minute ago, if that. Does a man in shock know he is in shock?

Probably not.

If I rewind history fifteen minutes, this chaotic mass of fire and smoke was a stunning lake house. Now its owner is being cremated in the ruins of his home, and we two survivors stumble about as reality slowly returns with soul-searing clarity. An imaginary newscaster’s voice speaks in my head: Brody Royal, multimillionaire sociopath, burned to death last night in a fire started by his antique flamethrower. Sadly, Royal was unable to complete the murders he was contemplating prior to his demise, due to a sudden and suicidal intervention by a man he’d ridiculed as harmless for the past twenty years—

Brody’s house shudders like some giant creature, and then, with the sound of cracking bones, one wing implodes. The heat diminishes for a few seconds, then suddenly intensifies, as though feeding on the evil within. Soon it will drive us farther back, away from Johnston’s body.

Caitlin stares at the burning wreckage as though she can’t quite grasp what’s happening. Five minutes ago we both believed we were dead, yet here we stand. Covered with ash and streaked with sweat, her face has a burn scar to match my own. I want to speak to her, but I don’t quite trust myself.

Beyond her, the lake’s mirrored surface reflects back an image of the tower of flame, and with a rush of fear I see our future in it. Like the pillar of fire the Israelites followed across the desert, this beacon too will lead men to us.

Is that a siren? Caitlin asks, looking away from the raging flames, and toward the narrow lane at the edge of the light.

I think so. My older ears belatedly pick up the distant whine.

That way, she says, pointing westward, away from the lake.

I peer through the darkness, but I can’t make out any police lights through the orange glare and waves of superheated air.

What about Henry’s files? Caitlin asks. I should hide them.

The charred box that Caitlin salvaged from the burning basement stands a few feet from Sleepy Johnston’s body. From the looks of the ashes inside, little of Henry Sexton’s journals remains.

There’s nowhere to hide them, I tell her.

What about the boathouse? she asks, a note of hysteria in her voice.

They’ll search that. It’s too late anyway. A neighbor’s coming. Look.

The nearest house is seventy-five yards away, but a pair of headlights has separated from the garage and begun nosing down toward the lane that runs along the lake here. Perhaps emboldened by the siren, the car’s driver has finally decided to investigate the fire. Must have heard the gunshots earlier, I think, or they’d have been here long before now.

The siren is growing louder and rising in pitch. That’s probably the Ferriday fire department, I think aloud. But the law won’t be far behind. I hope it’s Sheriff Dennis, but it could be the FBI or the state police. They may question us separately. We need to get our stories straight.

Bewilderment clouds Caitlin’s eyes. We both lived through the same thing, didn’t we?

I take her hand, and the coldness of it startles me. I don’t think it’s quite that simple.

Everything you did in Brody Royal’s basement was self-defense. They were torturing us, for God’s sake!

"That’s not what I mean. The tough questions won’t be about what happened in the basement. They’ll be about why it happened. Why did Royal kidnap us? Why did he want to kill us? We’ve held back a lot over the past couple of days." And not just from the police, I add silently.

What if we just say we don’t know?

"That’s fine with me, so long as you don’t plan to publish any stories about it in the Examiner."

At last, realization dawns in her eyes. Oh.

A half mile from the lake, the whirling red lights of a fire engine break out from behind the trees that line the levee, then veer onto the narrow lane that runs along the shore of Lake Concordia. A half mile behind it, three vehicles traveling in train quickly follow. The flashing red arcs are much closer to the road on those vehicles, which means they’re police cruisers. Our window of opportunity to shape history is closing fast.

I found Brody Royal’s name in Henry Sexton’s journals, Caitlin says, spinning her story on the fly. That led me to interview his daughter. Out of fear of her father, Katy panicked and took an overdose of pills before I arrived to question her, but she still implicated Brody in multiple murders. Katy’s husband walked in on us after she passed out—that would have been documented by paramedics, if not police. Up to that point, everything’s more or less true. Royal learned from Randall Regan that I’d questioned Katy, and they retaliated to keep me from publishing what I’d learned from her.

This fairy tale might convince the Concordia Parish sheriff, but probably not the FBI. Too many people saw me go into St. Catherine’s Hospital, I say. They know I spent twenty minutes alone with Brody. Now that he’s dead, his family’s liable to make all kinds of accusations about me going after him. Kaiser will find out sooner or later.

Surely you can explain that conversation somehow?

I sure can’t admit that I tried to cut a deal with him. Under the pressure of the approaching authorities, my mind ratchets down to the task at hand. What if I pick up where your story leaves off? I went to St. Catherine’s Hospital to make sure Royal wasn’t going to take some kind of revenge against you for his daughter’s suicide attempt. I suspected that he’d ordered several murders during the 1960s, and Katy had verified that to you. I also believed Royal had ordered the hit attempts on Henry at the newspaper and the hospital, and I was worried he’d do the same to you. That makes sense, right?

Caitlin nods quickly, her eyes on the whirling lights.

I step closer to her. Are you going to tell the cops about your recording of what Katy said?

I might as well, since Brody burned both copies. They’re going to read about it in tomorrow’s paper anyway.

Closing my eyes, I see Caitlin’s Treo smartphone and my borrowed tape recorder being consumed by the fearsome blast of a flamethrower. You really don’t have another copy at the newspaper?

Her look of desolation is my only answer.

The fire engine has reached the head of Royal’s driveway. We only have seconds now.

What about Brody’s confessions? Caitlin asks. That he was behind Pooky Wilson’s death? That Frank and Snake Knox killed Pooky at the Bone Tree?

We tell the cops all of that. Every bit of it helps justify what we did tonight.

Caitlin looks strangely hesitant, which I don’t understand. Even if we tell the police about those confessions, she can still publish the story before any other media outlet gets the information.

For God’s sake, I say, "until tonight, no one was even sure the Bone Tree was real. And Royal admitted taking part in the gang rape of Viola Turner. We’ve got to tell them that."

Caitlin gives me a pointed look. Brody also told us your father killed Viola. Do you want to tell the police that?

Of course not.

All right, then. That’s why I’m asking what we hold back. Is there anything else?

I can’t read her eyes. We’ve kept so much from each other over the past few days that it’s hard to know where our stories might diverge if compared to one another.

The rifles, I say softly. Those two rifles in the cabinet that he showed us just before you held the razor to his throat. Did you see them?

Yes, but I wasn’t really paying attention. I was waiting for my chance to attack him.

There were identifying plaques beneath every other rifle in the gun collection. But on those two plaques there were only dates. Dates, and a small American flag emblem.

Caitlin shrugs. So?

The dates were November twenty-second, 1963, and April fourth, 1968.

She blinks in confusion for a couple of seconds, but then her eyes go wide. No way. I mean . . . do you really—

I don’t think so. But if we don’t tell Kaiser about them, whatever’s left of those guns might disappear tonight. And we’ll never know.

Caitlin gingerly touches the burn on her cheek. Let’s hope Sheriff Dennis is in one of those cars, and not the goddamn state police. Not that Captain Ozan.

I reach out and squeeze her shoulder. Whoever it is, act more disoriented than you are. You really are in shock, but play it up more. When they question you, try to stick to the past hour, nothing more. Act exhausted, and play up your injuries.

Caitlin doesn’t appear to like this plan. I don’t want to spend the night in a damned hospital. This is the biggest story I’ve ever been involved in. I’ve got zero time to waste.

I know. Moving forward, I pull her tight against me. An hour ago I made the worst mistake of my life by begging her to suppress part of a story in order to try to bargain with a killer for my father’s life. I’ve got no right to try to control anything she does now. I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you. You tried to tell me something like this would happen. My worry over Dad blinded me.

She shakes her head against my chest. It wasn’t just you. Once I made that recording of Katy, Brody was going to come after us, no matter what.

But he wouldn’t have known about the recording if I hadn’t told him.

This is debatable, but Caitlin only draws back and looks hard into my eyes. "Whatever happens now, I need to get back to the newspaper. Please do whatever you can to make that happen."

The fire engine screeches to a stop thirty feet from us, and uniformed men leap off and out of it. The hoses come out faster than I would have believed possible, but these guys don’t have a prayer of putting out this inferno. One fireman hurries toward the body on the ground and drops to his knees, but I call out to him that the man is dead.

What happened? shouts another man from behind me. Is there anybody still in the house?

When I turn, I see a fire captain wearing a black hardhat and a fireproof coat. Three dead men. That’s all I know. Not from the fire, though. There was a gunfight.

His mouth drops open. Gunfight? In Mr. Royal’s place?

Brody Royal’s one of the dead.

Oh, no.

His son-in-law is another. The third is Henry Sexton, the reporter.

The fire captain shakes his head, unable to comprehend what I’m telling him. Is that it? Nobody else?

I really don’t know. There’s nobody I’d risk my men to save.

The fireman looks at me as if I might be out of my mind.

They were torturing us, I say. Before the fire.

Torturing . . . ? The captain looks closer at me. Hey, I know you. You’re the mayor of Natchez. Penn Cage.

That’s right.

Are you okay?

"I guess so. This is Caitlin Masters, the publisher of the Natchez Examiner."

What the hell started the fire?

The answer to this question isn’t something the fire captain could accept. Let’s see . . . Brody Royal was preparing to burn off Caitlin’s arm with a flamethrower. I was chained to the wall, tearing my hands to shreds in my desperation to break free. That’s when Henry Sexton, despite his injuries, somehow struggled to his feet and shielded Caitlin with his body. Royal meant to burn him too, but like some medieval martyr, the reporter charged Royal and threw his arms around him before the old man could safely ignite the flamethrower. While the rest of us stared in horror, Henry pulled the trigger and immolated them both, creating a firestorm that no amount of water could smother—

Mayor? says the fire captain, catching hold of my shoulders. Maybe you ought to sit down, huh?

A World War Two flamethrower, I mumble. Loaded with gasoline and tar.

The man shakes his head in disbelief, then motions for help and starts shouting orders.

The sound of gunning motors makes me turn toward the driveway entrance. Three Concordia Parish Sheriff’s Department cruisers roar up behind the fire truck. Two park there, but a Chevy Tahoe pulls around the fire truck and drives up to within ten feet of me before it stops.

Thank God, Caitlin says in my ear.

Sheriff Walker Dennis gets out of his cruiser and stumps toward us. Three years shy of fifty, he carries himself like a minor-league baseball star gone to seed. He weighs 220 pounds and has forearms that would discourage anyone from betting against him in an arm-wrestling match. The way he wears his brown uniform and Stetson gives the impression that he’s been a sheriff all his adult life, but in fact he only took over the job about six weeks ago, after his predecessor was indicted on corruption charges that decimated the entire department.

Are you okay? Dennis shouts, striding forward and grabbing my forearm as though to reassure himself that I’m alive.

Yeah, yeah. Caitlin, too.

The sheriff looks over at the fire. Two crews have trained hoses on the base of the flames, but most of the house is gone already.

Anybody in there? Dennis asks.

Royal and Regan, both dead.

Shit. They couldn’t get out?

No.

The sheriff gives me an odd look. You couldn’t get ’em out?

"I didn’t try, Walker. They kidnapped us from the Examiner office—or sent two guys to do it. They were torturing Caitlin for information when this guy—I point at the dead body of Sleepy Johnston—busted in with Henry and saved us. Royal had a flamethrower in there. It was a miracle we got out alive."

Henry’s dead too, Caitlin says.

Walker Dennis rubs his forehead like a man with an incipient migraine. This has already been one of the worst days of his life, and this event will only compound his difficulties. I obviously should have pressed you harder about Brody Royal.

It wouldn’t have mattered.

He takes a tin of Skoal from his breast pocket, opens it with some urgency, and jams a pinch beneath his bottom lip. "Who the fuck is that?" he asks, pointing at the dead man on the ground.

Sleepy Johnston. You know him better as ‘Gates Brown.’

The sheriff’s eyes widen. Dennis knows Gates Brown as the alias of a man who haunted the periphery of our investigations for the past couple of days. Walking closer to the body, he looks down at the face of a sixty-seven-year-old black man who lived in this area as a boy, then fled to Detroit for the rest of his adult life.

"This the guy who called me about seeing Royal and Regan burning the Concordia Beacon?"

I nod.

We need to get the hell out of here. The state police could show up any second, and we need to get some things straight before you talk to them.

I glance at Caitlin, who’s watching us closely. I nod, thinking the same thing that she and Dennis must be: Captain Alphonse Ozan.

All right, Dennis says. Let’s get back to the department to get your statements. At least that way I’ll be on my home turf if they try to take this case away from me.

What about the FBI?

Agent Kaiser called me just before I got here. He’d just heard about the fire, but he didn’t seem to know it was Royal’s house yet.

I’ll bet he does by now.

Sheriff Dennis spits on the ground and leans close to me. We’ve got a jurisdictional clusterfuck on our hands here. And both our asses are on the line.

I know.

You ride with me, he says, pulling me toward his Tahoe. Ms. Masters can come in the car behind us.

Hold on. I yank my arm loose. Caitlin rides with us.

Walker shakes his head. Sorry. I have to separate you two. A lot of eyes will be watching this. I’ve got to follow procedure.

Surely she can ride with us? You can swear we didn’t talk on the way.

Sensing danger, Caitlin has come up beside me and taken hold of my arm.

I’m sorry, Dennis says firmly. It’s got to be this way.

Before I can argue further, Walker leans in close and says, My brother-in-law will be driving the second car. If you need to call her on the phone, you can. The stupidest thing we can do is stay here and argue. You want Ozan to arrest you two for killing one of the richest men in Louisiana? A friend of every governor for the past fifty years?

I’ll be fine in the second car, Caitlin says, nudging me toward Dennis’s truck. Let’s not waste one more second. Just let me grab Henry’s files.

Walker gives her a grateful look, then signals a deputy standing by one of the cruisers behind the fire truck. The man reaches us as Caitlin trots back with her box, and Dennis introduces him as Grady Wells, his brother-in-law. I beg Wells to take care of Caitlin like he would his own flesh and blood, and he promises that he will.

If the state police try to pull us over, Walker tells Wells, ignore them. Don’t stop until we get back to base. You only take orders from me. Ignore the radio, and if they start yelling at you over their PA speaker, pay no mind. We’ll hash out the jurisdictions when we get to the station.

Moments later, six doors slam, and our small convoy begins racing toward Highway 84 and the Mississippi River. Turning to look back through the rear windshield, I see the pillar of fire still towering over the vast alluvial plain, announcing calamity to the world. If my mother and daughter were to look out of their third-floor window high on the Natchez bluff, they would see it in the distance. As I think of my mother, a double-edged knife of guilt and anger slips between my ribs, and I wonder whether my father is within sight of that roaring flame.

CHAPTER 2

TOM CAGE DROVE through the cold Louisiana night in a stolen pickup truck, his .357 Magnum pressing hard against his right thigh. An unconscious hit man lay on the seat behind him, hands bound together and lashed to a gun rack mounted at the rear of the cab. A corpse lay on the floor between them, a bullet from Tom’s .357 in his belly.

Tom had taken a Valium and some nitroglycerine, but he was still suffering from tachycardia, and no thought he could summon seemed to calm his overburdened heart. Walt Garrity had almost certainly been killed tonight, trying to extricate Tom and himself from the trouble Tom had gotten them into, and now nearly every cop in two states was combing the highways in search of them, believing they’d murdered a Louisiana state trooper, as well as Tom’s former nurse, Viola Turner.

Walt had shot the trooper, all right, but only to stop him from killing Tom in cold blood. Even so, the cold-eyed state policeman had put a bullet through Tom’s shoulder before he died, and while that wound had been treated some hours ago, the pain had now built to an excruciating level. Tom didn’t dare take enough narcotics to dull the agony. Fifty years of medical experience told him that the gunshot wound had pushed him into a state where he could simply collapse behind the wheel and be dead before the pickup truck came to a stop. Only two months ago he’d suffered a severe coronary and barely survived. In the past seventy-two hours, he had endured more stress than even a healthy seventy-three-year-old man could take without caving under the strain.

Tom could scarcely believe that six weeks ago life had seemed relatively quiet. Having recovered from his heart attack, he’d been looking forward to his son’s marriage, which was planned for Christmas Eve. But then Viola Turner had returned to Natchez, trailing the past like a demon in her wake. The cancer that drove Viola back home after four decades in Chicago had reduced the beautiful nurse he’d once loved to a desiccated shadow of herself; despite his nearly fifty years of medical experience, Tom had been profoundly shocked by the sight of her. The grim truth was that Viola had come home to Natchez not to retire, but to die. The first night he saw her, he’d realized he might conceivably be charged with murder in the near future. A merciful act that usually went unreported might well draw the attention of a vindictive sheriff and DA. But not even in his darkest dreams could Tom have imagined that he and Walt would be running for their lives.

The bound man in the backseat moaned. Tom debated whether to stop the truck and sedate the would-be assassin again. The hit man’s name was Grimsby, and he was thirty years younger than Tom. If he regained full consciousness, Tom would have difficulty handling him, even with his hands and feet bound. Tom had only managed to tie the bastard by chemically incapacitating him first. Along with his now-dead partner, Grimsby had cornered Tom at the edge of a nearby lake. And though Tom had been armed, he’d resigned himself to death before the two killers ever appeared. But then—by the simple act of checking his text messages—Tom had learned that Caitlin was pregnant. That knowledge had transformed him from an old man tired of running (and killing) into a patriarch committed to seeing his fourth grandchild—and perhaps his first grandson—born. With chilling deliberation, Tom had shot one of the two arrogant hit men as they faced him, then disarmed Grimsby and forced him to carry his dead partner up to Drew Elliott’s lake house, in which Tom had been hiding.

After retrieving his weekend bag, Tom had filled a syringe with precious insulin and jabbed Grimsby in the back as he loaded his dead partner into the truck. That put the hit man into insulin shock. While he lay sprawled across the backseat of the truck, barely breathing, Tom had bound his hands with an old ski rope he’d found in Drew’s garage, then tied his hands to the gun rack so that Grimsby couldn’t attack him if he revived during the ride. Tom hadn’t intended to kill the other man, but his options had been limited, and the pair had surely meant to execute him beside the lake—an emotionless murder for hire. If Grimsby died (or lived out his days in a coma) as a result of the insulin overdose Tom had given him, so be it.

Tom’s real dilemma was what to do next. If he pointed the truck toward civilization, he would come to a roadblock sooner rather than later, and there he would be shot while resisting arrest. To avoid this, he’d driven the truck into the low-lying backcountry between Ferriday, Rayville, and Tallulah, endless cotton fields so thinly populated that they felt deserted, but Tom knew better. He had been born in the southwestern part of Louisiana, and he’d gone to undergraduate school at NLU in Natchitoches, where he’d met his wife. But Peggy Cage, née McCrae, was from an eastern Louisiana farm only ten miles from where he was now. The nearest conglomeration of people to her father’s homestead was a tiny crossroads village called Dunston, which lay about forty miles north of Ferriday. This familiarity gave Tom the only sense of security he’d felt in a long time: Peggy had relatives in this area, and Tom had treated them and most of their neighbors for medical emergencies while visiting over the years. He knew he could rely on the loyalty of clannish country folks.

He needed to get rid of the truck as fast as he could. Grimsby and his partner had almost certainly notified their boss that they’d cornered him at Drew’s lake house, and that meant Forrest Knox would have an APB out for their truck in no time. Tom felt confident that his wife’s brother would help him ditch the truck, but that meant putting another family at risk, and Tom had already gotten people killed by doing that.

Peggy would tell me to do it, he thought.

The real question was what to do if he did manage to get safely to ground somewhere. This nightmare had begun when he was charged with Viola’s murder, but the death of the state trooper had complicated matters exponentially. Jumping bail on the first charge only made him look more guilty, and further reduced his options. Walt’s plan had been to seek help from the superintendent of the Louisiana State Police (who, like Walt, was a former Texas Ranger) in getting the APB on Tom and Walt withdrawn. But something had obviously gone wrong. Tom had expected Walt back long before the two hit men found him, yet he’d heard nothing.

That left two options. He could try to turn himself in to some arm of law enforcement—preferably the FBI, if he could reach them—and hope to survive the encounter. Or he could do exactly what he’d advised Penn not to do—deal with the devil direct, and try to remove his family from harm’s way by any means necessary. Given that he was likely surrounded on all sides by Louisiana’s state and local cops, the chance of safely delivering himself into the arms of federal agents was small. Simply using his personal cell phone was likely to bring a state police helicopter down on his head within five minutes, and the last burn phone Walt had left him might well be compromised by now. They had used it too many times already.

The ring of the very phone Tom was thinking about stunned him, and his shoulder began to pound, telling him his blood pressure had spiked at the sound. He stared at the phone for two more rings, then answered.

Hello?

It’s me, said a voice that made him sag against the truck’s door. Are you okay?

I thought you were dead. Tom craned his neck around to try to see if the hit man had woken up.

I didn’t want to put you at risk by calling you. Even now we shouldn’t spend more than a minute on the phone.

Did you have any luck with Colonel Mackiever?

No. And don’t say his name again. He got delayed, but he’s on his way up here now.

Up here meant Baton Rouge.

FK has already moved against him, Walt said.

Forrest Knox, Tom thought.

I don’t know the details, Walt continued, but it sounds like they’re trying to discredit Mac and take his job.

So he can’t get the APB revoked?

Not with a phone call. He needs to hear our side of the story before he can move. That’s the next step. But that’s not why I called. The colonel just told me something you need to know. Brody Royal was killed tonight, in his house on Lake Concordia. That reporter died with him, Henry Sexton.

No. Tom’s heart began to pound again.

Yep. And there’s more bad news.

The hammering in Tom’s chest began to solidify into angina. Not Penn—

No—hell, no. But Penn was apparently there when it happened, and Caitlin, too. They’re alive, but that’s all I know right now. Mac just caught it over his radio. Royal’s son-in-law died there too, and a black fellow I never heard of. Nobody Mac trusts seems to know what really went down.

Where are Penn and Caitlin now?

In custody. Concordia Parish Sheriff’s Department. State police heard it from firemen on the scene. Alive and in squad cars, only minor injuries. I’ll try to learn more, but you don’t hear from me, they’re fine. If anything’s seriously wrong, I’ll call you. Don’t call me back except in an extreme emergency.

Okay.

How you doing? Melba still there?

No. I’m not either.

What?

FK sent two guys to the lake house, and they nearly got me. I’m lucky to be alive, to tell the truth.

What?

He sent them to kill me. I turned the tables. One’s KIA, the other tied up in the backseat.

Jesus. How the hell did you manage that, the shape you’re in?

A little luck and a lot of drugs. What the hell do we do now?

Walt only paused for a few seconds. You need to go to ground somewhere while I talk to the colonel. And don’t try to cover any distance—you’ll hit a roadblock. Can you think of anywhere close that’s safe?

Actually, yes. But your part’s done. You need to get back to Texas. You’ve got Carmelita to think about. Just get clear, buddy.

That’s enough of that. Look, we’ve been on the phone too long already. Let me ask you one more question.

Walt’s voice sounded strange.

What is it?

What do you plan to do with the survivor in the back?

I’m not sure. I figured I’d ditch him somewhere. Cotton field, probably.

I don’t think that’s a good idea.

Where, then?

Nowhere. After a pause, Walt said. He’s KIA. Just like the first one.

It took a moment to absorb Walt’s meaning. I can’t do that. Too much has . . . Tom trailed off. Too many people are dead already.

Listen to me, Walt said in a voice that came all the way from their days in Korea. Mercy is a virtue you can’t afford. We already made that mistake once this week.

Tom thought of Sonny Thornfield and wondered if saving the old Klansman had really been a mistake, or whether he might yet play some positive role before events resolved themselves.

In the backseat, Grimsby stirred. Tom looked back but could see little in the darkness.

Hey, Walt said. Did I lose you?

Now that I think about it, Tom said, in case Grimsby had awakened, going to Mobile was about the smartest thing you could have done.

What? Walt said. Oh. I get it.

I wish to God I was there with you, Tom added, meaning it. He waited about ten seconds, then said, Well, I don’t like it, but I guess it’s my best chance. Mobile it is.

That’s enough dinner theater, Walt said in a quieter voice. Listen to me now. Get yourself a new burn phone at a Walmart. Better yet, send someone you trust to get you a half dozen. Then call this number. I want you to use a code to tell me where you are—a basic code. Three steps. Number the letters in the alphabet from one to twenty-six. Then spell out your message, convert it to numbers, and multiply each letter-number by the number of men who died in the ambulance at Chosin. We clear on that number?

Just the mention of that ambulance made Tom grimace. Yeah.

Call and give me a string of numbers, nothing else. Like thirty-six, break, two-seventy-five, break, one-fifty, break. You got it?

Yeah.

Remember, if you don’t hear from me, Penn and Caitlin are fine.

Tom nodded wearily in the dashboard light. "It’s good to

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