Mississippi Blood

Greg Iles

This is the final volume of a trilogy of novels that includes “Natchez Burning” and “The Bone Tree,” and the total number of pages for all three comes in a 2,326. At this point, I’m 261 pages from finishing the whole thing, and it’s all I can do to not race out of The Day newsroom — where I’m typing this — and finish. This finale presumably wraps up an insanely complex series of characters and situations based around race in Mississippi, loosely starting with the JFK assassination and carrying through 2005. At the fore are a Ku Klux Klan offshoot called the Double Eagles and their nemesis Penn Cage, a prosecutor/bestselling novelist/mayor of Natchez who is Iles’ signature character. In “Mississippi Blood,” Cage’s elderly father, respected physician Dr. Tom Cage, is on trial, charged with murdering his longtime nurse (and secret lover), an African American woman named Viola Turner. Any more, it’s hard to imagine many folks having the patience to sit down to take on three long and interlocking novels. I beg of you: do it. This trilogy is the stuff of much greatness.