The Quiet Game - Hardcover

Iles, Greg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0340686022 ISBN 13: 9780340686027

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton, 2000

Synopsis

If anyone knows Death, Penn Cage does. He, himself, has sent 16 men to their fate as District Attorney, and killed one by his own hand. And now his beautiful young wife is gone too, leaving him alone with their young daughter. He decides to go home; home means Natchez, Mississippi, and the ghosts of his past. There he stumbles over a long-forgotton crime - the death of a black man in '68 - which could explain not only his own life, but that of the whole community. A community which seems to have been playing the quiet game for the last 30 years...

About this title

Review

Successful novelist Penn Cage comes back to Natchez to recover--a long career as a prosecutor has left him with enemies on both sides of the law and he has been shattered by the death of his wife. A quixotic decision to talk frankly about the town's racial politics to Caitlin, an attractive woman journalist, means he is asked to investigate the long-ago murder of black civil rights worker Del Payton, and almost at once he is being threatened, cajoled and shot at. Cage finds his enquiries coming close to home--his doctor father has skeletons in his closet and Liv Marston, the high school sweetheart Cage loved and lost, comes back into his life the moment he starts investigating the activities and connections of her industrialist father.

Iles' Natchez is a superficially civilised rats nest of intrigue where everyone plays the quiet game:

White and black both. Everybody keeping quiet, making like things is sweet and easy, trying to fish that new plant in here. Nobody wants nobody digging into Del's killing. Nobody 'cept you...Del's killers is playing the quiet game too. They been playing it thirty years. Not even sweatin'. You got to make people nervous to win the quiet game...

Cage, a man driven by a mixture of justice and vengeance, is a convincing new hero from Iles, if one who comes with rather more back story than is always easy to assimilate. The eventual courtroom drama--Cage adopts the high-risk strategy of making Marson sue him for slander--is especially powerful. --Roz Kaveney

Review

Start with an irresistible plot, add a heavy dose of historical intrigue, mix a host of shadowy characters, just a dash of terror on very page ... and you have Spandau Phoenix, a scorching read (John Grisham)

Mortal Fear is a fine piece of writing and a tremendous thriller. In it, technology knows its place - as fiction's servant never its master (Independent)

Books such as Mortal Fear marked Iles out as a novelist of distinction and ambition but the level of achievement in this new book comes as a surprise; the author's ability to take on powerful themes such as the limits of personal responsibility (while never losing the momentum of an accessible thriller) is singularly impressive (Publishing News)

The Quiet Game takes us on an engrossing, page-turning ride into the heart of terror, past and present, in a Southern town. Iles's writing is so immediate that we feel we know his characters personally. (Jeffery Deaver)

Edition details

• Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0340686022
• ISBN 13: 9780340686027
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480