NATCHEZ BURNING: GREG ILES

This was quite a change for me, a large novel (800 pages) set in the South, a thriller about the racial injustices in Mississippi during the 1960's.   The murder of retired black nurse Viola Turner in 1998 leads Penn Cage, a former prosecutor and now mayor of Natchez back to the 1960's when the Ku Klux Klan were running rampant over both the city, state and federal governments.  Reporter Henry Sexton, having lived through these times as a young boy, has been searching, researching and chronicling these abuses in his weekly newspaper and is finally ready to start naming perpetrators, beginning with local red necks, police,  and Natchez and Louisiana bigwigs. Penn's father, a revered doctor for fifty years also plays an important part in the story, having been a doctor in the 1960's and having employed the murdered nurse, Viola, for three years before she abruptly quit and went North. Also essential to the story is Penn's fiancee, Caitlin, who also happens to be a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and editor of the Natchez paper.

When Penn begins to look into the past, to the death of Viola, he gets pulled into the world of the 1960's, of killings of blacks, abetted by local cops and politicians.  And Penn finds his father is also somehow involved in all of these activities.  Soon, however, things heat up and Penn begins to undercover what locals were involved in the murders.  And just about at this time, Penn's father mysterious disappears without telling Penn where he is going.  Henry, who has been researching these murders for years, allows Penn and Caitlin to see his research, implicating the locals. When the stories start to get published, Henry is shot, survives and is taken to the hospital, only to be shot and killed again by a Ku Klux Klan-er.  As Penn digs deeper and deeper, more people get killed and they finally discover who killed Viola, the reason being to keep her from talking about the murder of her brother by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960's. There is some sort of closure but not much because there are two more volumes to follow.  The second volume, THE BONE TREE was just published a couple of months ago.  I liked this novel for  realistic portrayal of the rampant white racism, in the 1960's in Mississippi, where the white man reigned, the black man feared.  It seems like those times have not changed that much. My one pet peeve, how the story depends on Penn not telling his fiancee what he's doing, his father refusing to tell Penn where he's gone, Henry keeping the stories of the past to himself, all of which lead to the violence in the story.