William Faulkner famously and wisely said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”   That’s the main theme of this whole trilogy. A secondary theme might be from Martin Luther King, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that.  

The Bone Tree
by Greg Isles
Read by Robert Petcoff – 32h 17m
Rating A- / crime fiction – thriller
(#2 in the Natchez Burning trilogy)

The 1st book of this trilogy, Natchez Burning, ends as the second book begins and it does so seamlessly. The survivors are still counting the dead after a serious battle in Natchez Burning and a few minutes later they’re still doing that in The Bone Tree.   I read the books back-to-back and I thought it was pretty cool – perfect for a continuing read.  

What wasn’t so cool is that Iles retells almost the whole story of Natchez Burning as he progresses though the first third or so of The Bone Tree.  It’s basically a rehash but …  Oh well – I suppose that’s better for the readers who had to wait for Book 2. But as a result, I wasn’t  nearly as fond of The Bone Tree as of Natchez Burning.  This time includes more dealings with a sociopath at the head of one of the worst KKK offshoots in the South and he gets involved with Carlos Marcello, a New Orleans Mafioso.  But that’s a story of Tom Cage’s younger days as told in Book 2, 

Actually, present time in all three books is the 2010s, but the backstory which is being investigated by Penn Cage and Caitlin Masters is continuous through the books but not necessarily in chronological order.   

The Bone Tree is basically how bad the old KKKers were, back in the 1960s and ‘70s, determined as they were to defy the Integration and Civil Rights Acts mandated by the Federal Government and that ugly attitude grew and spread in certain families.  Over the years Black men had gone missing and there were still old rumors of evil-doing.  A local doctor, Tom Cage (protagonist of many Greg Iles’ books) helps all those who come to him, but he and his nurse, a beautiful Black woman, get romantically involved. She was raped by some of the KKK’ers in those wild-ass late 60s and later she left town.  At some much later time, the late 1990s?,  she returned for a final goodbye as she was very ill.  This time she is murdered and Tom gets the blame.  That’s the setting of The Bone Tree.  And that brings all the good ‘ol boys out to play.  It gets gritty and involves a lot of secrets –