The Bone Tree: A Novel (Penn Cage Book 5)

I have often compared Greg Iles to be our generation's Faulkner. And man can this gentleman write!!! The Bone Tree is the latest of the Penn Cage saga, that started with one on my favorite books, The Quiet Game. The way Mr. Iles has weaved us the modern South which may or may not have made strides in the progress of equal rights, evil organizations, and the machinations of family is nothing short of brilliant-- The Cage family is local royalty. Dr. Cage and his family have helped many and in his office, he treated black and white alike. Penn Cage and his daughter come home after his wife's death to start a new life. You really have to start from The Quiet Game to fully understand the good, bad and the ugly. The Bone Tree is the latest in the series. The more Cage books, the longer they get as the information is so amazing. This is an 800 page book. I have a Kindle and ordered it, but my router died so I got the hard copy. Most of the story needs the explanation and pages fly by. You will come to see there is no black or white but shades of grey. And oh my, the writing is brilliant. You will run the gamut of emotions reading The Bone Tree. I reread the latter pages many times to let things sink in. There is one more in the Penn Cage book series and cannot wait. To cry, to read with my mouth opened in amazement, to let this family and story sink in, in words of prose that read like poetry. The impact sometimes hitting you in the gut, and realizing your family has done both good and bad and created a chain of events even they couldn't have imagine. Mr. Iles has been through a lot, and for the good is newly married, but how he can write!!!!! I am ashamed I have been writing my novel for three years but there are reasons for that.. If only my words touch people, I'll do a jig. If you want brilliance, choose Greg Iles every time. You will not regret any page read. Mr. Iles, I hope one day to meet you at a signing to shake the hand of one of the best writers of our time. If you are up to date in the Cage saga, read The Bone Tree. It will change you in many ways. This is how to write classics that will last forever... Bravo, Greg Iles. Ellen George, author of the children's book Flutterby, poetry and short stories in various anthologies, and a great book, and novellas in the works.

This book was riveting and I couldn't stop reading as per usual, but it began getting absurd about half way through. Even though the story is full of suspense, the way Iles portrays the FBI is absolutely absurd. There's no way in hell the Feds are this stupid. Their hotel rooms are bugged, by a chamber maid no less, they allow the police station they're running the investigation out of to be compromised, allowing the murder of a most vital witness they promised to protect, and they run around like a bunch of bumpkins making silly mistakes. Lastly they allow their plane to get blown up losing all their evidence. Huh. None of these things sound remotely plausible. Then Penn walks in and murders Knox even though he's the biggest bad ass on Earth and no one's touched him in years. That's the second man Penn kills in this one book. He's quite the super hero. Untrained lawyer kills the baddest of the bad. Then of course they're is the issue of the JFK assassination..... So stupidly unnecessary! There's already a hundred things going on, the investigation is so overwhelming and detailed and follows so many threads that the reader just wants to give up. I skimmed ALL the JFK crap. The Jordan Glass interview with Castro in Cuba!? Don't even get me started. I am.finishing this series regardless. I'm hooked, and I like the bare boned story. It's all the added things I dislike. There's too much going on here. But last its the death of Caitlyn that does me in. That's when I got really pissy. It's too much and to find Tom Cage in the Bone tree was so silly as well. There's just a lot of unnecessary dramatic things that don't make much sense. It's gotten messy. Three stars.

A stellar follow up to Natchez Burning. One of the best middle installments of a trilogy I have ever come across. The heart of these books is family - not just one family - several. And the deceit and lies they tell and the lengths they will go to love and protect their own. The Cage family (one that has been prominent in several books written by the masterful Greg Iles), is revered by most in Natchez - even when their choices are not understood; while the Knox family incites fear in women and men alike. Good does not just battle evil in the Bone Tree. It is not a place that most can find. And is not a place you want to visit. For most do not escape. Hard choices are made daily and evil wins out... most of the time. But champions like Dr. Tom Cage, Penn Cage and Caitlin Masters take up the cause to fight for those who cannot fight for themselves, like Viola Turner and Henry Sexton. Dr. Tom Cage, having suffered more than most will stop at nothing to protect what he holds dear. Caitlin Masters works tirelessly to try and discover the mysteries of the Bone Tree. She finds it and discovers the true evil that lurks there. And Penn Cage - he learns a hard lesson that justice and right and wrong aren't always clear cut. He will be tested at every turn. And he will be left questioning everything. The themes in this book are riveting and heartbreaking: the roots of racism/modern-day racism in the south; and a conspiracy theory regarding the death of JFK (and the deaths of RFK and MLK). It is these themes interwoven with the beloved characters of Tom and Penn Cage that make this book impossible to put down. There were parts of this novel that had me in hysterics sobbing. I divorced but living in the house with my ex-husband when I read it. At one point, I was reading it and was sitting at our kitchen table and found myself reading a part that stunned me. I cried hysterically and could not stop. I read one page over and over and was un-consolable. I could not continue on in the book. My ex happened to be in the room. We were on good terms at the time.. and he came over and even tried to comfort me.. it was not possible. This book is gut wrenching, suspenseful novel and will turn your insides out. It will have you smiling one minute and crying and/or yelling the next. It is Greg Iles at his absolute best and one of the best novels I've read this year. I recommend this to anyone who loves a good suspense novel and wants to read about characters who stay with you forever. Review revised on 4/7/17

Alles zur Zufriedenheit wie erwartet verlaufen, danke.

Thoroughly enjoyed this book. I am an avid reader of Greg Iles and brings the story to life. The history side makes me look into the past and delve deeper. Penn Cage doesnt seem to take a trick in his life, so hope in the next book it comes together for him. A must read for those who enjoy crime/suspense novels.

The Bone Tree is number two in a trilogy involving Penn Cage, the lawyer, now Mayor of Natchez, Although I believe you would get more out of this second book by reading Natchez Burning first, I also think The Bone Tree could stand alone. This second novel begins exactly to the day or minute after book one ends. The plot is very complex and exciting, melding some cold case murders of the past with newer crimes of the present The excitement builds over 800 pages and doesn't let go even in the last few pages. Yes I am an unabashed fan of Greg Iles. His writing is excellent, literate, grammatically sound and most importantly intelligent. The subject of the book may encompass a span of fifty years, but the matter of racism is still current and affects us today as much as it did during the civil rights era. The conspiracy theories of the assassinations of the 1960's are still open to debate. And man's inhumanity to his fellow man is still prevalent everywhere. I look forward to his third book in the trilogy, coming in the Spring of 2017. It will be on my wish list shortly.

Greg Iles get better and better - the saga continues, and really takes the reader into the dark world of racism in the USA. Interwoven fact and fiction always makes for a good tale, and this guy has it down to a fine art

I started reading The Bone Tree immediately after finishing Natchez Burning, which made me rather proud of myself, as the first book of the trilogy was quite a tome, both figuratively and literally - 850+ very intense pages....Nevertheless, I was left with enough energy and curiosity to see what would happen afterward, also because the end of the previous novel left quite a few important points of the story open. And actually, as I started The Bone Tree, I felt like it was a new chapter of the previous book rather than the first if a new one....its first pages start where the previous book ended, literally....for this reason also I would strongly recommend to embark into The Bone Tree only after reading Natchez Burning. The narrative approach also continues along the same lines, an awful lot of events stuffed into a very short time: if Natchez burning tells in 850 pages the events occurring over 3 days (from Monday morning to Wednesday night), The Bone Tree unfolds from Thursday morning till Saturday night. So, just another 3 days, but I felt like they were 3 months, considering the incredible amount of things happening. Fact is, the author pushes the envelope even more aggressively than in Natchez Burning, many situations are taken to such unbelievable extremes to become almost ridiculous: @ you will meet the absolute evil fighting the bravest men and women of this world, and probably beyond: when you think evil has won, our heroes come back, but then an even bigger danger comes up and you think "that's it, no way anyway can get out of this", except that our heroes do; but just to fall into an even worse nightmare, and that must be really the final one....yet no, the deeper they fall into trouble, the more miraculously they get out of them @ the amount of killings is absolutely amazing, I have lost the count well before half book...you are lead to believe that people in the South US spend their life shooting each others, possibly after the cruelest tortures. Pinochet's Chile was an amateur play compared to Mississippi... @ lawful men like FBI senior agents, sheriffs, policemen, lawyers happily bend the law to rescue our hero from various criminal acts, including murder, and still looking like they are doing the obviously right thing So, a typical case when too much is too much....still, despite this feeling of indigestion, there remain enough space to fit in long sections dedicated to the JFK assassination; the author here refers to Oliver Stone in a mocking tone, but he falls himself into another conspiracy theory which makes him look like a bad copy of Stone. So, this was for me a 2,5 stars, which I rounded up to 3 acknowledge the fact that, despite all the above, the author managed to get me to the end f the book - which actually it is another very open-ended one, in fact everything is postponed to the final book. Now, my only remaining question is, given the number of dead in this book, if there remain enough people to populate the next one (that might be the reason why it took so long to issue the last part of the trilogy).