Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Iles wraps up his massively ambitious Natchez Burning trilogy with a book that is (in keeping with its predecessors) compelling, dark, surprising, and morally ambiguous. Its hero, Penn Cage, has done things that might be considered reprehensible, but in these circumstances his father about to stand trial for a murder he might very well have committed; his fiancée having been recently murdered; and his family's lives in jeopardy we can understand why Penn steps outside the normal boundaries of acceptable behavior in his pursuit of the truth about his father and about the Double Eagles, a white-supremacist organization with a deep connection to the history of Mississippi and to Penn's own family. Familiarity with the first two books in the trilogy, Natchez Burning (2014) and The Bone Tree (2015), isn't a requirement here the author has devised a very clever way of bringing readers up to speed but, even so, there are some plot threads and references to previous events that might be missed by those jumping into the story in midstream. With these three novels, Iles has told an epic story that rips apart the modern history of Mississippi (he lives in Natchez himself), exposing a secret underbelly that, while fictional, feels real enough to have actually happened. This trilogy is destined to become a classic of literary crime fiction.--Pitt, David Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Both unwieldy and tightly controlled, bestseller Iles's terrific conclusion to his Natchez Burning trilogy (after 2015's The Bone Tree) is a sweeping story that remains intimate. The Double Eagles, a savage KKK splinter group, have declared a personal war on Penn Cage, a former prosecutor who's now the mayor of Natchez, Miss., necessitating 24-hour security protection for him and his family. The toxic bigotry escalates as Penn's father, Tom, once a respected physician, goes on trial for the murder of his former nurse and one-time lover, Viola Turner, an African-American who was suffering from terminal cancer. Penn teams with Serenity Butler, a famous black author who plans to write about Tom's case. Together, they look into the secrets of the Cage family, the Double Eagles, and the South. Though a side plot about J.F.K.'s assassination stretches credibility, relentless pacing keeps the story churning, with unexpected brutality erupting on nearly every page. The trial scenes are among the most exciting ever written in the genre. Eight-city author tour. Agents: Dan Conaway and Simon Lipskar, Writers House. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Mississippi Blood concludes a trilogy within a series, following Natchez Burning and The Bone Tree. Listeners unfamiliar with the two earlier titles should read or listen to them in sequence as the characters and plots actually form a single, compelling thriller set in the South from the 1960s to the present. Central to this portion of the tale is Penn Cage's reaction to Dr. Tom Cage's trial for the murder of Viola Turner, an African American nurse Tom once employed. Penn and his daughter Annie are still in mortal danger from the menace of KKK radicals, the Double Eagles and their leader "Snake" Knox. The suspenseful activity (murder, mayhem, pursuit) is superb, and the conclusion is quite satisfying. Since Penn has narrowly escaped death and witnessed or committed murder several times, his irate, overly sensitive reactions to details of his father's defense may seem a bit much. Narrator Scott Brick's characterizations are excellent-consistent and emotional. Verdict Highly recommended for adult audio collections. ["Heart-racing, enthralling thriller": LJ 12/16 starred review of the Morrow hc.]-Cliff Glaviano, formerly with Bowling Green State Univ. Libs., OH © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Delta whodunit master Iles (The Bone Tree, 2015, etc.) brings his politically charged, timely trilogy of Mississippi murder and mayhem to a thunderous close.Life for Penn Cage is never a bowl of cherries. A bucket of blood, more like it. As this last installment in the Natchez Burning trilogy opens, he's in a bloodier mess than ever, depressed, full of bitter self-awareness: "When someone you love is murdered," he reflects, "you learn things about yourself you'd give a great deal not to know." Other questions loom. Why is his jailed father stubbornly clinging to a secret guaranteed to shake up otherwise sleepy Natchez? Now that the Klan-on-steroids villains have come under new management, what kind of awful mischief are they going to make for the placeand how do they figure in that secret, anyway? To begin to answer those questions, Iles swings full circle back into the territory of the first volume and its unlikely archive of once-forbidden, even now fraught interracial relationships; "anyone in possession of those ledgers," Penn reveals, "would never have to worry about money again, so valuable would they be as a blackmail tool." No, but there are plenty of other things to worry about, things that make the normally even-keeled Penn feel not so bad about shooting a bad guy in the back, "where I know his heart is pumping violently." Iles mostly sticks to the format of the hard-boiled procedural, though there's some nicely wrought courtroom drama here, too, with a none-too-subtle dig at a fellow Southern mysterian: "The why doesn't come into it. That's for John Grisham and the Law Order writers to worry about." Speedboats, bullets, and floods of the red stuff fly and flow, wrapping up to a clean conclusionthough with the slightest hint of an out, in case Iles decides to stretch the trilogy into another book or two. Faulkner meets John D. MacDonald, and that's all to the good. A boisterous, spills-and-chills entertainment from start to finish. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
