The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Iles thrills again with ‘Cemetery Road’
The words “magnum opus” could have been created to describe Greg Iles’ “Natchez Burning” trilogy. Now, Iles returns with “Cemetery Road,” an ambitious stand-alone thriller that, like its predecessors, is both an absorbing crime story and an in-depth exploration of grief, betrayal and corruption in a small Southern community.
The narrator and protagonist is Marshall McEwan. Marshall is a native son who has made a name for himself in the wider world, and who has returned to his childhood home — Bienville, Miss. — under difficult circumstances. Marshall’s father, who has run Bienville’s local paper for most of his life, is dying.
Marshall, himself a journalist, leaves his post at CNN and returns to Bienville to help his father and. He soon discovers that the town itself is dying, a victim of diminishing economic opportunities. The town needs a miracle to survive. But when that miracle arrives, trouble follows.
A group of Chinese investors have agreed to construct a billiondollar paper mill on the outskirts of Bienville, bringing jobs and eventual prosperity back to the town. When Buck Ferris, amateur local archeologist, discovers what may be ancient ruins on the proposed building site, he is murdered before his discovery can affect negotiations for the mill. Marshall, for whom Buck was a childhood friend and mentor, is determined to track down the killer, whatever the cost. His investigation brings him into immediate conflict with the town’s ruling cabal, a sinister group of power brokers called the Poker Club. The club’s 12 members treat Bienville as their private fiefdom, and they are fully prepared to go to war against anyone who stands in their way.
These elements form the public face of the novel and are set against a painstakingly created backdrop of complex, often painful personal relationships. Marshall’s return to Bienville is, on one level, the act of a dutiful son. On another, it is a direct confrontation with the darkest moments of his past. And the past, as anyone familiar with Iles’ fiction knows, is a potent — and omnipresent — force.
Though strictly speaking a suspense novel, “Cemetery Road” is, in fact, a great deal more. In the precision and power of its language and its sheer amplitude of detail, Iles’ latest calls to mind the late, great Southern novelist Pat Conroy. Like Conroy, Iles writes with passion, intensity and an absolute commitment to the material at hand.