Get ready to dig in and allow yourself a few weeks to read Greg Iles' latest Penn Cage Natchez thriller. Southern Man is overly long, depressing, ambitious and filled to the brim with racial tensions, subversion, betrayal, murder and a bunch of antebellum homes burning to the ground.
A crippled Penn Cage is preparing for his mother's death as a revered Natchez home is set alight. Just up the road, a rap concert becomes a bloodbath when racial tensions get out of hand. Penn's daughter barely survives among 23 dead.
Meanwhile, one-armed Bobby White uses the scenario as fodder for his race to the presidency..
Southern Man is an exhausting great read. But it could've been much shorter or published in two parts.

I have been waiting endlessly for this latest installment in the Penn Cage series, and "Southern Man" was well worth the wait. This is an absolutely fantastic follow-up to the previous "Mississippi Blood," although it takes place 15 years later. In this latest, we find Penn Cage alone, seemingly down and out, until a mass shooting changes everything for him. In his thrilling style, Greg Iles pens a remarkable tale with his signature ability to use history as a backdrop - "what's past is merely prologue" could not be truer, both in life and in these books. Greg Iles is the type of author that once you read the first paragraph you are immediately hooked, so make sure you start this fantastic book on a weekend, because you won't want to come up for air until its done. This should be on everyone's "to read" list for this year. Absolutely wonderful and deserves 100 stars if possible!

Penn Cage is not the man he once was. He now walks with a limp from the prosthetic he gained after a car accident. But some things remain the same. Penn Cage once again finds himself haunted by America’s past and present racial tensions. The Mission Hill Massacre where officers open fire on an unarmed and largely African American crowd threatens to tear Mississippi apart. Someone is setting fire to Antebellum homes, stoking the embers of a fire that has always burned in the United States, especially the South.

This book shows us what could happen if another Civil War breaks out. Will this be the last of Penn Cage? You’ll have to read to find out.