Southern Man by Greg Iles

 Fifteen fictional years have passed since readers got to peek into the life of Penn Cage, and things have changed, as told by Greg Iles in Southern Man (Penn Cage 7), which comes out May 28. Iles recently announced that he needs a stem cell transplant, just like his character Cage, saying “This should explain the multiple postponements of the release that generated so many emails and which I was unable to answer candidly at the time.”

The series started in 1999 with The Quiet Game. In 2024, Cage is a different man—no longer a hot shot attorney active in local politics—and his writing career has been set aside to tend his mother who is dying of multiple myeloma, the same disease Iles has suffered from for years and that is now escalating. Over the years, Cage has also lost his physician father in a prison riot and nearly his own life in a serious traffic accident that took part of his leg, the very same thing that happened to Iles.

Daughter Annie has grown up and is working as a civil rights lawyer in Jackson, Mississippi, while Cage is living quietly on a former cotton plantation above the Mississippi River. Before she succumbs, his mother Peggy has made a deep dive into family history, and she is encouraging her son to put off his next book until he reads all the work she has pieced together.

Meanwhile, Cage is drafted into advising local government when a police action shooting at a hip-hop concert not only injures his daughter but threatens the community structure of Bienville, Mississippi. Quick action by third-party presidential wannabe Robert E. Lee White, who moves in to re-inflate Annie’s collapsed lung, gives her some relief  before an ambulance reaches her backstage at the concert.

Besides the shooting dubbed the Mission Hill Massacre, a  radical group is setting fires to antebellum mansions in Bienville and Natchez that the black community sees as concentration camps for slaves. The city and county governments are challenged to find answers to calm the county-wide panic. Before all is said and done, Bienville is on the verge of a race war.

Cage theorizes that the fires are not historic retribution by radicals but what he calls “false flag strikes” that have triggered the chaos in the streets of Bienville. Worse, the white county police and the black city police are at odds as county leaders begin to dissolve the city government made up mostly of black citizens including the mayor.

The situation deteriorates as the black community is fuming over the assassination of one of their own and the lynching of a teenager who witnessed that bloody event. The white community in the divided town is outraged by the continuing destruction of its antebellum mansions. Before the story ends, lives will be lost as Cage and Annie find themselves in the midst of events triggered by Bobby White as he seeks a national stage for projecting himself as the man of action destined for the White House.

Chockful of local history and a family history narrative, Iles has created his magnum opus in a multi-layered story that stretches more than 900 pages. The work seems to be a culmination of everything Iles has wanted to say about politics, race relations, and civil rights as he plumbs the depths of United States history, especially the Civil War and its aftermath. The whole nation has its eyes on the unfolding events in Bienville as anarchy threatens the state of Mississippi.

Greg Iles has penned standalone books as well as his Penn Cage series. He was set for a stem cell transplant to take place before Southern Man was published, and at this time, there has been no further announcements regarding the author’s health. Born in Germany in 1960, where his father ran the US Embassy Medical Clinic during the height of the Cold War, Iles lives in Natchez, Mississippi, with his wife and children.