The Quiet Game
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Overview
When former prosecutor Penn Cage returns to his hometown of Natchez, Mississippi, he doesn't find the peace he desperately craves. He finds that his own father is being blackmailed by a corrupt ex-cop. And when Penn investigates, he uncovers a murderous secret—and the small town's violent past
Synopsis
Penn Cage is no stranger to death. As a Houston prosecutor he sent sixteen men to death row, and watched seven of them die. But now, in the aftermath of his wife's death, the grief-stricken father packs up his four-year-old daughter, Annie, and returns to his hometown in search of healing. But peace is not what he finds there.
Natchez, Mississippi, is the jewel of the antebellum South, a city of old money and older sins, where passion, power, and racial tensions seethe beneath its elegant façade. After twenty years away, Penn is stunned to find his own family trapped in a web of intrigue and danger.
Determined to save his father from a ruthless blackmailer, Penn stumbles over a link to the town's darkest secret: the thirty-year-old unsolved murder of a black Korean War veteran. But what drives him to act is the revelation that this haunting mystery is inextricably bound up in his own past. Under a blaze of national media attention, Penn reopens the case, only to find local records destroyed, the FBI file sealed, and the town closing ranks against him.
Penn joins forces with Caitlin Masters, a beautiful young newspaper publisher, on a quest that will lead from the bayous of the South to the highest reaches of the U.S. government. His need to right a terrible wrong pits him against the FBI, the powerful judge who nearly destoyed his family, and his most dangerous adversary: a woman he loved more than twenty years before, and who haunts him still. His crusade for justice will ultimately lead him into a packed Mississippi courtroom, where he fights a battle that could end a decades-old silence and force the truth to be spoken at last.
Publishers Weekly
Although it takes place in Natchez, Miss., and is flavored with the violence and seamy undertones of a Southern Gothic, this fourth thriller by Iles (Spandau Phoenix) owes just as much to a familiar parallel universe where wealthy male lawyers double as tragic heroes, women are invariably smart and attractive, and trials are by definition "high profile." After his wife's death, Penn Cage, a former Houston prosecutor and a bestselling suspense novelist, retreats to his parents' home in Natchez with his grieving young daughter. The healing process is interrupted when Cage learns that someone is blackmailing his father, a saintly family doctor who once made a lethal mistake. In tracing the source of his father's moral dilemma, Cage stumbles upon a trail of lies surrounding the unsolved murder of a black man in 1968. He determines to reopen the case, even though his antebellum hometown is smoldering with racial tension. With the assistance of Caitlin Masters, the attractive, smart and ambitious publisher of the local newspaper, Cage gradually uncovers an intricate conspiracy that reaches up to the highest levels of the FBI. Forced to confront powerful Judge Leo Marston, who nearly destroyed his father in pursuing an unrelated, unfounded malpractice accusation decades before, Cage must also face Marston's daughter, Livy, his old high school sweetheart, who tries to persuade Cage to let sleeping dogs lie. It is difficult at times to sympathize with Cage, who proselytizes about truth, justice and obligation, yet destroys evidence to protect his father and fails to properly shield his loved ones as he single-mindedly pursues the case. Still, this ably crafted, richly atmospheric legal thriller is engrossing, and readers will forgive Iles's protagonist a few shortcomings. Agent, Aaron Priest. Major ad/promo; 15-city author tour; British rights to Hodder Headline; audio rights to Recorded Books. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewGreg Iles, a gifted young suspense novelist from Natchez, Mississippi, is nothing if not ambitious. His first two novels, Spandau Phoenix and Black Cross, were sprawling, wide-screen thrillers set against meticulously researched World War II backdrops. His third book, Mortal Fear, combined cutting edge computer technology with an effective variation on that modern archetype, the serial killer. (Mortal Fear, unfortunately, seemed to run out of steam in the final chapters, but for most of its length, was an original and thoroughly engrossing piece of work.) And now we have The Quiet Game, which may be Iles's most ambitious novel to date, a book that is at once a courtroom drama, a murder mystery, a meditation on the recent history of race relations in Mississippi, and a lively, full-blooded example of the Southern Gothic.
As The Quiet Game opens, Penn Cage -- a prosecuting attorney turned bestselling novelist -- is returning, with his four-year-old daughter, to his childhood home of Natchez, where he hopes to recover from the extended trauma of his wife's recent death. Once there, he finds himself quickly caught up in an interconnected series of events whose roots reach back into his -- and his family's -- personal past, and into the troubled, sometimes violent history of Natchez itself.
Shortly after his arrival, Penn discovers that his father, a respected physician, is being blackmailed by a local lowlife named Ray Presley. At about the same time, during the course of an interview with Caitlin Masters, the beautiful, Boston-born publisher of The Natchez Examiner, he inadvertently draws attention to the most notorious race crime in the city's history: the unsolved murder of Del Payton, a black factory worker killed by a car bomb in 1968. Penn's caustic, casually delivered comments on the case have immediate and unexpected consequences: Del's widow, Althea Payton, asks Penn to reinvestigate her husband's murder, while several other parties, each with their own agendas to protect, attempt to pressure Penn into ignoring the request, and allowing the case to remain safely -- and permanently -- unsolved.
Penn's own inclination is to do just that until he meets a tormented, alcoholic policeman named Ike Ransom. Ransom makes the unsubstantiated claim that the person responsible for the Payton murder was Judge Leo Marsden, the man who nearly destroyed Penn's father by implacably pursuing a frivolous malpractice suit some 20 years before. Yielding to the desire for personal revenge, Penn reverses his original position and agrees to take a fresh look at the 30-year-old mystery.
Penn's investigation forms the heart of the narrative and leads, eventually, in some unexpected directions. Before it is complete, that investigation will widen to encompass not only the Payton murder, but the personal history of the Cage family, the tragic sexual secrets of Livy Marsden -- Penn's former lover and Leo Marsden's daughter -- and the paranoid manipulations of the long-deceased J. Edgar Hoover. His pursuit of the elusive truth leads Penn from the mansions and ghettos of Natchez to a cabin in the Colorado mountains, and culminates in a desperate, winner-take-all slander trial whose outcome remains uncertain until the final pages.
The Quiet Game is a densely detailed, swiftly paced novel that constantly runs the risk of going over the top, but never quite does. In the end, Iles holds it all together through an impressive combination of nerve, ingenuity, and narrative energy, and through the sense of personal conviction with which he invests the entire complex enterprise. Like its edgy, impulsive narrator/hero, The Quiet Game moves relentlessly toward closure, and toward a hard-won sense of personal redemption. Along the way, it addresses a number of difficult issues, issues concerning race, class, family, the burdens of history, and the enduring importance of moral accountability. The result is an intricate and absorbing story by a writer who is constantly evolving and who seems likely to produce some significant popular fiction in the years to come. (Bill Sheehan)
Publishers Weekly -
Although it takes place in Natchez, Miss., and is flavored with the violence and seamy undertones of a Southern Gothic, this fourth thriller by Iles (Spandau Phoenix) owes just as much to a familiar parallel universe where wealthy male lawyers double as tragic heroes, women are invariably smart and attractive, and trials are by definition "high profile." After his wife's death, Penn Cage, a former Houston prosecutor and a bestselling suspense novelist, retreats to his parents' home in Natchez with his grieving young daughter. The healing process is interrupted when Cage learns that someone is blackmailing his father, a saintly family doctor who once made a lethal mistake. In tracing the source of his father's moral dilemma, Cage stumbles upon a trail of lies surrounding the unsolved murder of a black man in 1968. He determines to reopen the case, even though his antebellum hometown is smoldering with racial tension. With the assistance of Caitlin Masters, the attractive, smart and ambitious publisher of the local newspaper, Cage gradually uncovers an intricate conspiracy that reaches up to the highest levels of the FBI. Forced to confront powerful Judge Leo Marston, who nearly destroyed his father in pursuing an unrelated, unfounded malpractice accusation decades before, Cage must also face Marston's daughter, Livy, his old high school sweetheart, who tries to persuade Cage to let sleeping dogs lie. It is difficult at times to sympathize with Cage, who proselytizes about truth, justice and obligation, yet destroys evidence to protect his father and fails to properly shield his loved ones as he single-mindedly pursues the case. Still, this ably crafted, richly atmospheric legal thriller is engrossing, and readers will forgive Iles's protagonist a few shortcomings. Agent, Aaron Priest. Major ad/promo; 15-city author tour; British rights to Hodder Headline; audio rights to Recorded Books. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.Library Journal
A decision to give up a lucrative law practice in Houston and return to his home town in Natchez, MS, plunges author/ attorney Penn Cage headlong into a 30-year-old unsolved murder with all the trappings of a civil rights case. Penn's motives smack of personal vendetta, since the man he suspects of planning the murder is a powerful former state's attorney and judge who tried to ruin the medical practice of Penn's father through an unsuccessful malpractice suit several years earlier. As Penn probes into the murder, he begins to discover an FBI cover-up, thrusting his family into a life-threatening situation. Iles (Mortal Fear) has penned a Southern superthriller that rivals John Grisham's best. Fast-paced action, surprise tactics, and down-and-dirty legal maneuvering played out below the surface calm of the deep South will transfix the reader to the very last page. Recommended for all public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/99.]--Thomas L. Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.Charles Winecoff
It's a tribute to Iies' flair for characterization that this capacious thriller grabs you fast and keeps you glued. Such a stunt wouldn't be nearly as much fun if his cast of living, breathing Southerners didn't make you care.— Entertainment Weekly