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Cemetery Road

A Novel

ebook
4 of 4 copies available
4 of 4 copies available

Don't miss the latest Natchez Burning novel, SOUTHERN MAN

Sometimes the price of justice is a good man's soul.

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Natchez Burning trilogy returns with an electrifying tale of friendship, betrayal, and shattering secrets that threaten to destroy a small Mississippi town.

"An ambitious stand-alone thriller that is both an absorbing crime story and an in-depth exploration of grief, betrayal and corruption... Iles's latest calls to mind the late, great Southern novelist Pat Conroy. Like Conroy, Iles writes with passion, intensity and absolute commitment."

Washington Post

When Marshall McEwan left his Mississippi hometown at eighteen, he vowed never to return. The trauma that drove him away spurred him to become one of the most successful journalists in Washington, DC. But as the ascendancy of a chaotic administration lifts him from print fame to television stardom, Marshall discovers that his father is terminally ill, and he must return home to face the unfinished business of his past.

On arrival, he finds Bienville, Mississippi very much changed. His family's 150-year-old newspaper is failing; and Jet Talal, the love of his youth, has married into the family of Max Matheson, one of a dozen powerful patriarchs who rule the town through the exclusive Bienville Poker Club. To Marshall's surprise, the Poker Club has taken a town on the brink of extinction and offered it salvation, in the form of a billion-dollar Chinese paper mill. But on the verge of the deal being consummated, two murders rock Bienville to its core, threatening far more than the city's economic future.

An experienced journalist, Marshall has seen firsthand how the corrosive power of money and politics can sabotage investigations. Joining forces with his former lover—who through her husband has access to the secrets of the Poker Club—Marshall begins digging for the truth behind those murders. But he and Jet soon discover that the soil of Mississippi is a minefield where explosive secrets can destroy far more than injustice. The South is a land where everyone hides truths: of blood and children, of love and shame, of hate and murder—of damnation and redemption. The Poker Club's secret reaches all the way to Washington, D.C., and could shake the foundations of the U.S. Senate. But by the time Marshall grasps the long-buried truth about his own history, he would give almost anything not to have to face it.

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    • Library Journal

      October 15, 2018

      Big-time journalist Marshall McEwan never thought he would return to his small Mississippi hometown, but his father is dying, and his mother can barely keep the local paper going. Alas, the town's economic rebirth seems to be based on corruption, and then an archaeologist is murdered at a construction site. With a 400,000-copy first printing.

      Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Kirkus

      January 15, 2019
      Bad things are astir on the banks of the Big Muddy, hallmark territory for homeboy Iles (Mississippi Blood, 2017, etc.)."Buck's passing seems a natural place to begin this story, because that's the way these things generally start." Yep. This particular bit of mischief starts when a Scoutmaster, surrogate father, and all-around good guy gets his head bashed in and his body dumped into the Mississippi. And why? That's the tangled tale that Iles weaves in this overlong but engaging yarn. Thanks to the back-room dealing of a bunch called the Poker Club, the little river-bluff city of Bienville has brought a Chinese paper pulp mill to town and, with it, a new interstate connection and a billion dollars--which, a perp growls, is a billion dollars "in Mississippi. That's like ten billion in the real world." But stalwart journalist Marshall McEwan--that's McEwan, not McLuhan--is on the case, back in town after attaining fame in the big city, to which he'd escaped from the shadow of his journalist hero father, now a moribund alcoholic but with plenty of fire left. Marshall's old pals and neighbors have been up to no good; the most powerful of them are in the club, including an old girlfriend named Jet, who is quick to unveil her tucked-away parts to Marshall and whose love affairs in the small town are the makings of a positively Faulknerian epic. Iles' story is more workaday than all that and often by the numbers: The bad guys are really bad, the molls inviting ("she steals her kiss, a quick, urgent probing of the tongue that makes clear she wants more"), the politicians spectacularly corrupt, the cluelessly cuckolded--well, clueless and cuckolded, though not without resources for revenge. As Marshall teases out the story of murder most foul, other bodies litter the stage--fortunately not his, which, the club members make it plain, is very much an option. In the end, everyone gets just deserts, though with a few postmodernly ironic twists.Formulaic but fun.

      COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Booklist

      Starred review from February 15, 2019
      After the remarkable trifecta of Iles' magnificent, perhaps career-defining Natchez Burning trilogy, readers couldn't help but speculate about what the author would do next. After three thick novels, would he go with something shorter, sleeker, less freighted with dramatic import? Nope. His new book, coming in at more than 750 pages is another big one, but?as with the Natchez Burning novels?it contains not an ounce of fat. The story starts simply: in Bienville, Mississippi, a man is murdered. Marshall McEwan, a journalist who was closer to the murdered man than he is to his own father, vows to expose the killer, but to do that, he must go up against the most powerful men in Bienville, who are part of a conspiracy that goes much deeper than McEwan could possibly have imagined. Iles sits alongside the icons at the top of today's crime-fiction mountain. He has made Mississippi his own in the same way that James Lee Burke has claimed Cajun country and Michael Connelly has remapped contemporary Los Angeles. Readers who have been eagerly awaiting his first post-Natchez novel needn't have worried; they will be talking about this one for a quite a while.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Another big, intense tale from a heavy-hitter.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

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