The Bone Tree

"The Bone Tree" is the second novel in Greg Iles's Natchez Burning trilogy, an intense and sprawling thriller for mature readers, typically high school age and up. It follows Penn Cage as he desperately tries to protect his father, Dr. Tom Cage, who is accused of murder. Penn's investigation forces him to confront his family's hidden past, deeply intertwined with the brutal realities of civil rights era Mississippi and a powerful, corrupt white supremacist group known as the Double Eagles. The book explores themes of racial injustice, family loyalty, and the difficult pursuit of truth, offering a complex narrative that is both a legal procedural and a historical thriller. Parents should be aware of prominent themes of violence, racism, and historical trauma.

A follow-up to Natchez Burning finds Southern lawyer Penn Cage desperately struggling to protect his father from false charges and corrupt officers by confronting the puppet master behind the Double Eagles terrorist group. Penn Cage's father, Dr. Tom Cage, stands accused of murder, and each effort to defend him unearths new, shocking secrets, leaving Penn to question whether he ever really knew his father at all. At issue is the murder of Tom's former nurse, Viola Turner. The district attorney is quick to point the finger at Tom, citing his decades-old relationship with Viola. When Tom is taken into custody, Penn must explore the dangerous territory of Tom and Viola's shared history, set squarely in the most harrowing years of civil-rights-era Mississippi. What was the relationship between Tom, Viola, and the 'Double Eagle Club,' an ultraviolent group of hardened men who considered themselves smarter, tougher, and more elite than their peers in the FBI-infiltrated Ku Klux Klan? In Natchez, Mississippi, where the past is never truly past, long-buried secrets tend to turn lethal when exposed to the light of day. For Penn Cage, the cost of solving this case is no exception.