Greg Iles Books In Order

World War II Books In Publication Order

  1. Spandau Phoenix (1993)
  2. Black Cross (1995)

Mississippi Books In Publication Order

  1. Mortal Fear (1997)
  2. 24 Hours (2000)
  3. Dead Sleep (2001)
  4. Sleep No More (2002)
  5. Blood Memory (2005)

Penn Cage Books In Publication Order

  1. The Quiet Game (1999)
  2. Turning Angel (2005)
  3. The Devil’s Punchbowl (2009)
  4. The Death Factory (2014)
  5. Natchez Burning (2014)
  6. The Bone Tree (2015)
  7. Mississippi Blood (2017)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Third Degree (1996)
  2. Dark Matter / The Footprints of God (2003)
  3. True Evil (2006)
  4. Cemetery Road (2019)

World War II Book Covers

Mississippi Book Covers

Penn Cage Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Greg Iles Books Overview

Spandau Phoenix

The Spandau Diary — what was in it? Why did the secret intelligence agencies of every major power want it? Why was a brave and beautiful woman kidnapped to get it? Why did a chain of deception and violent death lash out across the globe, from survivors of the Na*zi past to warriors in this new conflict about to explode? Why did the world’s entire history of World War II have to be rewritten as the future hung over a nightmare abyss?

Black Cross

It is January 1944 and as Allied troops prepare for D day, Na*zi scientists develop a toxic nerve gas that will repel and wipe out any invasion force. To salvage the planned assault, two vastly different but equally determined men are sent to infiltrate the secret concentration camp where the poison gas is being perfected on human subjects. Their only objective: Destroy all traces of the gas and the men who created it no matter how many lives may be lost…
including their own. Stunning…
. From the very first page, Greg Iles takes his readers on an emotional roller coaster ride, juxtaposing tension filled action scenes, horrifying depictions of savage cruelty, and heart stopping descriptions of sacrifice and bravery. A remarkable story from a remarkable writer. Booklist

Mortal Fear

By day, Harper Cole trades commodities over the internet from his isolated Mississippi farmhouse. At night, he is systems operator of E.R.O.S., an exclusive, sexually explicit on line service that guarantees total anonymity to its rich and famous clientele.

But now someone has penetrated E.R.O.S.’s state of the art security…
someone who has brutally murdered six celebrated women. Each time, the weapon and the city are different. And each time, the killer has claimed the same horrifying trophy.

For Harper Cole, who has suddenly become the prime suspect, there is only one way to lure the elusive madman into the open. But Harper Cole has dangerous sexual secrets of his own. His daring plan will place everything and everyone he loves in the path of a brilliant, unstoppable killer…

24 Hours

Greg Iles’s novels have been praised for their unusual depth of characterization and complexity of plot, and The Quiet Game was no exception. Reviewers called it ‘beautifully crafted’ The Providence Sunday Journal, ‘heartbreakingly honest’ Cleveland Plain Dealer, and simply ‘a grand thriller with a wonderful Southern seasoning’ The Orange County Register. In 24 Hours, Iles takes readers on a daringly executed roller coaster ride with enough twists and surprises to last a lifetime. 24 Hours begins with the perfect family. On the perfect night. About to become trapped in the perfect crime. Will Jennings is a successful young doctor in Jackson, Mississippi, with a thriving practice, a beautiful wife, and a five year old daughter he loves beyond measure. But Will and his family are being watched by a con man and psychopath who may be a genius. A man who has crafted the unbeatable crime. A man who has never been caught and whose victims have never talked to the police. A man whose life’s work strikes at the heart of every family’s unspoken fear: the unstoppable kidnapping. But this man has never met the likes of Will and Karen Jennings. ‘Here is a major talent strutting his considerable stuff.’ The Denver Post review of The Quiet Game

Dead Sleep

A woman is drawn into the hunt for her sister’s killer in this electrifying new thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of The Quiet Game.’A tour de force of suspense. It could as easily and terrifyingly be set in the Kansas of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.’ The Commercial Appeal review of 24 HoursWith five novels, Greg Iles has proven himself one of the most talented and versatile thriller writers at work today. Critics hailed 24 Hours as ‘diabolical’ People, ‘ingenious’ London Times, ‘masterfully written’ New Orleans Times Picayune, and ‘brilliantly plotted bone chilling suspense’ Publishers Weekly. In Dead Sleep, Iles gives us his most intricate and emotionally resonant story ever. Jordan Glass, a photojournalist on a well earned vacation, wanders into a Hong Kong art museum and is puzzled to find fellow patrons eyeing her with curiosity. Minutes later, she stumbles upon a gallery containing a one artist exhibition called ‘The Sleeping Women,’ a mysterious series of paintings that has caused a sensation in the world of modern art. Collectors have come to believe that the canvases depict female nudes not in sleep but in death, and they command millions at auction. When Jordan approaches the last work in the series, she freezes. The face in the painting seems to be her own. This unsettling event hurls her back into a nightmare she has fought desperately to put behind her for, in fact, the face in the painting belongs not to Jordan but to her twin sister, murdered one year ago. At the urging of the FBI, Jordan becomes both hunter and hunted in a duel with the anonymous artist, a gifted murderer who knows the secret history of Jordan’s family, and truths that even she has never had the courage to face.

Sleep No More

In Sleep No More, Greg Iles returns to the territory of some of his best loved works, the steamy and hypnotic small town Mississippi where Iles himself grew up. John Waters is a husband and father happy with his lot in life, though he has not always felt that way. Years earlier he escaped an obsessive love affair, which he feared might consume him. The woman in question disappeared after Waters married, and later he heard that she was killed in New Orleans. But now, Waters has an uneasy feeling that she has resurfaced to trouble him and entice him once again. A woman he meets casually stuns him with a smile and a secret only this former lover would know. But when this alluring stranger is suddenly murdered, Waters’s quiet life is enveloped in a whirlwind of guilt and suspicion, revealing the shadowy sides of love and friendship, and the terror that can result when passion becomes obsession. /Content /EditorialReview EditorialReview Source Amazon. com Review /Source Content Eve Sumner has an uncanny resemblance to a long dead woman with whom John Waters was once obsessively in love. The successful Mississippi oilman’s college affair with Mallory Candler ended long before she was killed, but the mysterious Eve knows things about that affair that only Mallory could have known. That’s more than a coincidence, since Eve is actually Mallory’s reincarnation or, at least, she’s the corporeal body into which Mallory’s restless soul seems to have migrated. Long before the bizarre denouement of this supernatural thriller a departure for Iles, whose previous thrillers have been much more straightforward the reader’s sympathies have been engaged by Waters, a decent man whose best friend may be his worst enemy and whose past may destroy his future. Iles has many gifts as a storyteller, including ingenious plotting and solid pacing, both of which are on display here, but this foray into the occult doesn’t show them off to best advantage. Jane Adams

Blood Memory

Catherine Cat Ferry is a forensic odontologist, a specialist in bite marks and the clues they provide. But while Cat’s colleagues know her as a world class scientist, she secretly attempts to manage her fragile psyche with alcohol, delving into the minds of rapists and murderers yet never allowing her own frightening past to creep into the foreground. Cat s latest case involves a disturbing murder in New Orleans. Banishing her personal demons, she focuses on the potential killer, until one morning she s paralyzed by a panic attack at a grisly murder scene. Praying the attack is a onetime event, she continues her job as a consultant to the New Orleans Police Department, but when another victim dies in the same shocking way raising fears that a serial killer is at large Cat blacks out over the victim s mutilated corpse. Suspended from the FBI task force, plagued by nightmares, and at odds with her married lover a homicide detective Cat finally reaches her breaking point. In a desperate effort to regain control over a life spiraling out of control, Cat retreats to her hometown of Natchez, Mississippi. But her family s secluded antebellum estate provides no sanctuary. When some of Cat s forensic chemicals are spilled in her childhood bedroom, two bloody footprints are revealed. This sight shocks her more than any corpse she has seen in her career. Cat s father was murdered when she was eight years old, but she always believed the crime occurred in the garden outside their home. The bloody footprints suggest otherwise. Driven by this fragment of her past, Cat attempts a forensic reconstruction of the decades old crime, even as developments with the New Orleans task force pull her back into the case she left behind. Plagued by troubling nightmares, Cat pieces together the horrifying events she has been shielded from all her life. Soon, both she and the FBI realize that the murders occurring now in New Orleans are intimately bound up with Cat s family and her past. Can Cat trust her own memories? Or has the truth been so distorted that she can never know her family s real history? Finding a solution to these intertwined murders means more than stopping a remorseless killer it may be the only way to save Cat Ferry s sanity…
and her life. Greg Iles is a masterful storyteller. In this dramatic novel of suspense he deftly probes the relationship between good and evil, and the unique power of human memory to reconstruct or completely reinvent the past.

The Quiet Game

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 forgotten 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…
/Content /EditorialReview EditorialReview Source Amazon. com Review /Source Content Is there space in the overcrowded courtroom for one more writer of sharp, very suspenseful legal thrillers? Yes if that writer is Greg Iles, who has proven in such varied efforts as Black Cross, Mortal Fear, and Spandau Phoenix that he knows how to squeeze the last drop of suspense out of all sorts of situations.

Iles immediately makes us feel both sympathy and empathy for his glossy hero, Penn Cage a former ace Texas prosecutor turned suspense novelist whose sales are up there in the John Grisham Himalayan range.

Trying to cope with the recent death of his wife, Cage takes his 5 year old daughter to Florida’s Disney World, where the child sadly sees visions of her mother everywhere in the fantasy filled environment. Wouldn’t a trip to his parents’ stately home in Natchez be more soothing for all concerned? Wrong, as it turns out and before Cage can catch his breath, he’s deeply involved in several dangerous matters. His father, a dedicated doctor, is being blackmailed for a past mistake in judgment, and a powerful judge who just happens to be the father of Penn’s high school sweetheart has a nasty personal agenda of his own. Then there’s the unsolved 1968 murder case of a black man, which Cage insists on reopening with the help of an attractive, ambitious newspaper publisher.

Iles does for Natchez what John Berendt did for Savannah in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, creating a gothic Southern landscape where elegance and depravity walk hand in hand. Dick Adler

Turning Angel

Turning Angel marks the long awaited return of Penn Cage, the lawyer hero of The Quiet Game, and introduces Drew Elliott, the highly respected doctor who saved Penn’s life in a hiking accident when they were boys. As two of the most prominent citizens of Natchez, Drew and Penn sit on the school board of their alma mater, St. Stephen s Prep. When the nude body of a young female student is found near the Mississippi River, the entire community is shocked but no one more than Penn, who discovers that his best friend was entangled in a passionate relationship with the girl and may be accused of her murder.

On the surface, Kate Townsend seems the most unlikely murder victim imaginable. A star student and athlete, she d been accepted to Harvard and carried the hope and pride of the town on her shoulders. But like her school and her town, Kate also had a secret life one about which her adult lover knew little. When Drew begs Penn to defend him, Penn allows his sense of obligation to override his instinct and agrees. Yet before he can begin, both men are drawn into a dangerous web of blackmail and violence. Drew reacts like anything but an innocent man, and Penn finds himself doubting his friend s motives and searching for a path out of harm s way.

More dangerous yet is Shad Johnson, the black district attorney whose dream is to send a rich white man to death row in Mississippi. At Shad s order, Drew is jailed, the police cease hunting Kate s killer, and Penn realizes that only by finding Kate s murderer himself can he save his friend s life.

With his daughter s babysitter as his guide, Penn penetrates the secret world of St. Stephen s, a place that parents never see, where reality veers so radically from appearance that Penn risks losing his own moral compass. St. Stephen s is a dark mirror of the adult world, one populated by steroid crazed jocks, girls desperate for attention, jaded teens flirting with nihilism, and hidden among them all one true psychopath. It is Penn s journey into the heart of his alma mater that gives Turning Angel its hypnotic power, for on that journey he finds that the intersection of the adult and nearly adult worlds is a dangerous place indeed. By the time Penn arrives at the shattering truth behind Kate Townsend s death, his quiet Southern town will never be the same.

Full of brilliant plot twists and shocking details, Turning Angel is Iles s most intricate and unforgettable story yet.

The Devil’s Punchbowl

From New York Times bestselling author Greg Iles comes his most electrifying thriller yet. The Devil’s Punchbowl reveals a world of depravity, sex, violence, and the corruption of a Southern town.

As a prosecuting attorney in Houston, Penn Cage sent hardened killers to death row. But it is as mayor of his hometown Natchez, Mississippi that Penn will face his most dangerous threat. Urged by old friends to try to restore this fading jewel of the Old South, Penn has ridden into office on a tide of support for change. But in its quest for new jobs and fresh money, Natchez, like other Mississippi towns, has turned to casino gambling, and now five fantastical steamboats float on the river beside the old slave market at Natchez like props from Gone With the Wind.

But one boat isn’t like the others.

Rumor has it that the Magnolia Queen has found a way to pull the big players from Las Vegas to its Mississippi backwater. And with them on sleek private jets that slip in and out of town like whispers in the night come pro football players, rap stars, and international gamblers, all sharing an unquenchable taste for one thing: blood sport and the dark vices that go with it. When a childhood friend of Penn’s who brings him evidence of these crimes is brutally murdered, the full weight of Penn’s failure to protect his city hits home. So begins his quest to find the men responsible. But it’s a hunt he begins alone, for the local authorities have been corrupted by the money and power of his hidden enemy. With his family’s lives at stake, Penn realizes his only allies in his one man war are those bound to him by blood or honor:

  • Caitlin Masters, the lover Penn found in The Quiet Can Game and lost in Turning Angel
  • Danny McDavitt, the heroic helicopter pilot from Third Degree
  • Tom Cage, Penn’s father and legendary local family physician
  • Walt Garrity, a retired Texas Ranger who served with Penn’s father during the Korean War
  • Together they must defeat a sophisticated killer who has an almost preternatural ability to anticipate and counter their every move. Ultimately, victory will depend on a bold stroke that will leave one of Penn’s allies dead and Natchez changed forever.

    After appearing in two of Iles’s most popular novels, Penn Cage makes his triumphant return as a brilliant, honorable, and courageous hero. Rich with Southern atmosphere and marked by one jaw dropping plot turn after another, The Devil’s Punchbowl confirms that Greg Iles is America’s master of suspense.

    Third Degree

    Laurel Shields, thirty-five and mother of two, awakens to find that her husband, Warren, a prominent local physician, is not in bed with her. Creeping out to the kitchen of their palatial home, she sees him through the doorway of his study, wildly pulling books from the shelves. Two weeks earlier, Warren and his partner were informed by the IRS that their medical practice was being audited; since then the stress on Dr. Shields has steadily ratcheted up. But Laurel has problems of her own. Quickly returning to the bedroom, she locks herself in the master bath, opens a home pregnancy testing kit, and fearfully tests herself. PREGNANT, announces the digital readout. Laurel closes her eyes as though absorbing news of a death, then quickly hides the evidence. She is not sure who the father is. Summoning all her strength, she walks into the kitchen to carry out the acting performance of her life. Later that morning, Laurel returns home and is surprised to find her husband’s car still parked in the driveway. The house has a strange stillness to it. In the den, she finds Warren sitting on the sofa in the same clothes he wore the previous day. His face is pale and unshaven, his eyes hollow with fear. Then, in come the children, innocent of it all… So begins the most terrifying day in the history of a marriage, one that in less than five hours will make the Shields house the vortex of a nerve-wracking siege. While a nervous ring of armed men awaits its chance to storm the suburban home, inside the house the clock ticks down on exposure of Laurel’s terrible secret. But she is not alone in her lies. Before the siege is through, this terrifying drama will pull in desperate characters from the town and drive Dr. Shields, his wife, and her lover to the very brink of sanity and survival.

    Dark Matter / The Footprints of God

    From the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author comes a cutting edge new thriller rich with imagination and vision. In the heart of North Carolina’s Research Triangle stands a corporate laboratory much like the others nearby. But behind its walls, America’s top scientists work around the clock to attain the holy grail of the twenty first century a supercomputer that surpas*ses the power of the human mind. Appointed by the president as ethicist to Project Trinity, Dr. David Tennant finds himself in a pressure cooker of groundbreaking science and colossal ambition. When his friend and fellow scientist is murdered, David discovers that the genius who runs Project Trinity was responsible and that his own life is in danger. Unable to reach the president, and afraid to trust his colleagues, David turns to Rachel Weiss, the psychiatrist probing the nightmares that have plagued him during his work at Trinity. Rachel is skeptical of David’s fears, but when an assassin strikes, the two doctors must flee for their lives. Pursued across the globe by ruthless National Security Agency operatives, David and Rachel struggle to piece together the truth behind Project Trinity and the enormous power it could unleash upon the world. As constant danger deepens their intimacy, Rachel realizes the key to Trinity lies buried in David’s disturbed mind. But Trinity’s clock is ticking…
    Mankind is being held hostage by a machine that cannot be destroyed. Its only hope a terrifying chess game between David and the Trinity computer, with the cities of the world as pawns. But what are the rules? How human is the machine? Can one man and woman change the course of history? Man’s future hangs in the balance, and the price of failure is extinction. Considered one of the most insightful and ingenious of the new generation of bestselling authors, Greg Iles has written a thriller that maps the fascinating territory where science and spirit clash in a battle for the future of humanity. Stunning in its scope, The Footprints of God is a brilliant realization of its author’s talent.

    True Evil

    If you wanted to kill your spouse and get away with it, you had to do something truly ingenious: something that wouldn t even be perceived as murder. And that was the service that Andrew Rusk had found a way to provide. Like any quality product, it did not come cheap. Nor did it come quickly. And perhaps most important of all, it was not for those with weak constitutions. Demand was high, of course, but few people were truly suitable clients. It took a deep rooted hatred to watch your spouse die in agony, knowing that you had brought about that pain. But on the other hand, some people bore up remarkably well.

    With these words, New York Times bestselling author Greg Iles returns to his trademark Southern milieu in this terrifying thriller, an unnerving tale of evil lurking beneath the veneer of idyllic suburban life. Brim*ming with the masterful suspense and intense psychological drama that made Turning Angel, Blood Memory, and The Quiet Game bestsellers, True Evil tells the chilling story of a divorce attorney who may be orchestrating the deaths of his clients spouses, bringing new meaning to the phrase til death do us part.

    Dr. Chris Shepard is thirty six years old, newly married, and well on his way to a perfect life. Or so he believes. But that future is forever cast into doubt the day Special Agent Alexandra Morse walks into his office and drops a bombshell: Dr. Shepard’s beautiful new wife is plotting his murder. Shepard is so shocked that he almost throws Agent Morse out of his office. Yet once he is alone, doubt begins to gnaw at him. Paranoia magnifies the small cracks in his marital relationship, and soon he can have no peace unless he knows the truth. When Agent Morse reappears, Chris agrees to act as bait to help her unravel the divorce lawyer s scheme, which may already have cost nine unsuspecting spouses their lives.

    At the center of the mystery lies a maddeningly simple question: If these people really were murdered, why can t the FBI prove it? Rigorous autopsies have uncovered no forensic evidence of foul play, and the police believe no crimes have occurred. As Dr. Shepard and Agent Morse struggle against an invisible adversary, Shepard realizes that he s working with a desperate woman. The reason: the killer s last known victim was Alex Morse s sister, who from her deathbed accused her husband of murder and extracted a vow that Alex save her ten year old nephew from his father. This has driven Alex to risk both her life and her career to fulfill that vow. But Chris Shepard soon feels desperation of his own. As he probes his wife s hidden past, he is confronted by the probability that the woman he loves wants him dead.

    He has adopted her son and given her everything he has to give, and yet somewhere out there, a killer with the brilliance to outwit the top forensic scientists in the world is closing in on him.

    Who is this merciless assassin? Why is murder an art form for him? And what clues could exist to lead them to a man of such twisted talents? Not even the clients who hire him know his identity, and the lawyer who works with him fears him above all else. Most terrifying, those who choose murder over divorce soon learn a terrible truth: once set in motion, the instrument of their anger cannot be stopped.

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