(Greg)
The Quiet Game is my first true “Natchez” novel, and my first Penn Cage novel. In Mortal Fear, I broke away from the Second World War and set my story in the Mississippi Delta, in a “town” inspired by the actual Midnight, Mississippi. In The Quiet Game, I came all the way home to Natchez. It was at this point that I faced the decision of whetheror not to create a fictional river town to set my stories. Ultimately, I think, I had no choice but to use the actual city. The reason? There is no other river town like Natchez, not even in Mississippi. What other town is the oldest on the Mississippi River? What other river town has lived under four successive national flags in its history? What other town once had more millionaires than any other city save New York and Philadelphia? What other Mississippi town had more than eighty antebellum homes–many of them colossal mansions---that survived the Civil War? What other town still built its social life around an annual “Pilgrimage” of Yankees and Europeans to those homes? And in what other Mississippi town could you legally drink alcohol until four in the morning? Trying to disguise Natchez in a novel would be like trying to disguise New Orleans. The deception would be utterly transparent, and thus utterly pointless.
The roots of The Quiet Game lie in my memories of watching the Ku Klux Klan ride on horseback through the streets of Natchez. They lie in the life of my father, a family physician who has always treated many of the black families in this area, and who treated one of the bombing victims of the civil rights era. (He also treated some of the whites on the other side of that issue, men it could be very dangerous to know.) And finally, they lie in my own past. In my best friend’s Jewishness. In my own teenage innocence and dreams of romance. Most of all, in my quest to understand crime, punishment, and justice deferred in the land in which I grew up.
In February 1967, a black Korean War veteran named Wharlest Jackson was blown up in his truck while he drove home from his factory job to join his family for supper. A friend of Medgar Evers, Wharlest Jackson suffered terribly before he died. As far as the public knew, the identity of his murderer was never discovered, and no one was ever punished for the crime. In the course of my own research, I came to believe something very different.
The events of The Quiet Game were only inspired by what happened to Wharlest Jackson. This book is certainly not his story, and the motives underlying the murder in The Quiet Game very different from those in the Jackson case. However, the issues involved in the Jackson case are most certainly expored in this novel. I hope you won’t let the idea that this is a “civil rights book” put you off. It is not that kind of book. This book is a thriller, and one that many have compared to John Grisham’s best. It has remained on Amazon.com’s list of top legal thrillers for many years now. I hope you enjoy it.
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 facade. 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 with 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 destroyed 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.
A riveting story of conspiracy, murder, and hard-won justice, The Quiet Game lays bare one of the most shameful chapters in American history by solving the abiding mystery of one man's past. It is Greg Iles at his unparalleled best.
Praise for The Quiet Game
"The pace is frenetic, the fear and paranoia palpable, and the characters heartbreakingly honest. Iles strikes not one false note."
- Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Here is a major talent strutting his considerable stuff."
- The Denver Post
"It's a tribute to Iles' flair for characterization that this capacious thriller grabs you fast and keeps you glued."
- Entertainment Weekly (A-)
"The first great page-turner of the fall might well be The Quiet Game...a gripping, beautifully crafted tale of murder and revenge that would make James Lee Burke or even Pat Conroy proud. [It] is a brilliant mystery and much, much more. This is storytelling at its absolute best, a tale of near-epic status to be savored as well as enjoyed."
- Providence Sunday Journal
"The plot turns and twists with surprise after surprise, and the culminating courtroom drama and conclusion are inventive and satisfying. His characters demonstrate, time after time, how we are haunted by the past, by bygone desires, failures and courageous moments. [His] mastery of the Southern setting rings with the truth of his own experience."
- New Orleans Times-Picayune