Since the FBI and the local police did little to try and uncover who had committed the murder she approached Penn.

When Penn returns to Natchez he is approached by Del Payton’s widow to try and obtain justice for her dead husband who was killed thirty years earlier. Penn suffered a heart attack that almost ruined his career. Penn’s medical practice with a bogus malpractice prosecution. A third strand that Iles weaves into his story is Judge Leo Marston, who years before as District Attorney tried to ruin Dr. Later, Penn’s father learns that Pressley had killed his sister’s tormentor with that same gun. Before learning this, Penn’s father, a doctor in Natchez had loaned a 38 pistol to a former policeman, Ray Pressley. Second, Penn’s father divulges a family secret that years before his Aunt Ellen had been harassed, raped, and beaten by her ex-boyfriend. Once a friend of the martyred civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, Payton was a voter registration organizer at the time of his death, making him a threat to the local powers that be. Almost immediately he is confronted with his own past, and that of Natchez.įirst, in 1968, Del Payton, then employed in the Battery Plant in town was murdered in a parking lot when a bomb exploded as he entered his automobile. Cage a successful Houston lawyer and prosecutor, in addition to being a bestselling author returns to his hometown of Natchez, Mississippi and his parents’ home to try and overcome the grief he and his young daughter Anna are coping with since the passing of his wife and the child’s mother. This approach is present in his first Penn Cage novel, THE QUIET GAME. Though these similarities may be present, Iles has a sharp pen, loaded with human emotion that easily galvanize the reader.

I have come to the conclusion that tinges of John Grisham and Pat Conroy are present in his work. Since the QUIET GAME is my first foray into his world of fiction that holds tremendous historical resonance, I was trying to place him among the novelists I am familiar with.

Greg Iles is a prolific novelist with many successful books to his credit.

The Quiet Game by Greg Iles