The Bone Tree

Going South

Greg Iles planned an epic trilogy about America’s Deep South, the centre of racism, violence and remnants of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan gangs. The first was Natchez Burning, the second is The Bone Tree, the third is yet to come out.

It’s a massive amount of work and words, as his hero Penn Cage, lawyer, novelist and Mayor of   Natchez tries to keep his family together, fight entrenched corruption in the local police department and also solve past Civil Rights cases; he also gets embroiled in a quest to unravel the conspiracy behind JF Kennedy’s murder.

Without having read the first book, some names and incidents may not be clear, but that doesn’t stop the reader from going through 800 plus pages, gripping in most part.

A can of worms must have opened in the last book, which explodes in the second part of the trilogy. At the centre of the action is the unbelievably powerful and venal, Forrest Knox who uses his position as a police chief of Louisiana to run every crime racket possible. Like his equally evil father, Frank, before him, and his grandfather Elam (serial child abuser, whose bible is covered with human skin), he is the head of a racist group called the Double Eagles to which his crazy uncle Snake and cousin Billy also belong. He hopes to make a fortune in real estate after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, by killing surviving black people and grabbing their homes.

Forrest is a formidable adversary for Penn Cage, who, when this story starts, is being tortured by a Double Eagles man Brody Royal, along with his new fiancée, local newspaper editor Caitlin Masters. They are saved by a journalist called Henry Sexton and another black man Sleepy Jonston (who must have had a bigger role to play in the last book), but Royal’s home is burnt to the ground, taking with it a lot of secrets; also throwing up some with the ashes and smoke.

An earnest FBI man John Kaiser is around to both aid and obstruct Penn— he is keener on following the JFK murder trail, than bothering about the immediate crisis. But everything leads somehow to the Knox family – a vile and demented bunch –and the Double Eagles.  What can solve many mysteries is the Bone Tree, a huge cypress that is somewhere in the middle of the vast Louisiana swamp, and the spot where Klansmen and Eagles dumped corpses of the women they raped and men they tortured.  Nobody talks about it or reveals its location for fear of inviting the wrath of the Knoxes.

Penn Cage’s father Dr Tom Cage and his buddy Walt are on the run, accused of murder. The cause of the Cage family’s current problems, is Dr Cage’s old nurse and lover Viola, who was raped by the Eagles and would have been killed years ago, but for the intervention of Dr Cage. To save her, he had to make a pact with a gangster, and unwittingly become a part of the Kennedy assassination plot.

Penn hides his mother and daughter and does everything he can to find and protect his father—the old man being virtually indestructible.  Meanwhile Caitlin and Kaiser’s photographer wife Jordan Glass take great risks to hunt for the Bone Tree.

There are dozens of characters, many subplots and a very complicated story that will continue into a third part. Fidel Castro makes a guest appearance when Jordan Glass goes to Havana to interview him. He is a link in the Kennedy killing chain, trying to keep Cuba from going the capitalist way. (“Sometime after I die, Cuba will revert to capitalism and the Walt Disney company will have Mickey Mouse running the damned casinos.”)

The Bone Tree is intricately plotted, and in spite of some slow and some implausible portions, very readable. A key character dies and one of the villains escapes to keep the story going into the next part.  All three together would make for an absorbing television mini series.

The Bone Tree

By Greg Iles

Published by William Marrow

Pages 804