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Six friends at Pitt started a game their freshman year. By the time the year came to an end, only five of them remained. But the game didn’t end there. Over a decade later it’s time for the next round to begin and this time they’ll have to play to the finish.

Christopher J. Yates’s debut is full of suspense and charged atmosphere.

First there is the game: one of dares and humiliation – what could go wrong there, right? Of course the stakes have to get higher to ensure the game doesn’t lose momentum and the “friends” begin to wonder if they were ever friends at all.

But Yates also tells the tale in a dual storyline – one from the characters’ freshman year and one fourteen years later. The identity of narrator in the present day thread is quite cleverly hidden from the reader initially. And when that person is revealed the reader begins to realize just how unreliable he or she may be.

Both the elements of the game and the way Yates’s characters play out make Black Chalk a deliciously wicked read, one that leaves the reader on edge right until the very last page.

5/14 Becky Lejeune

BLACK CHALK by Christopher J. Yates. Random House UK (April 1, 2014). ISBN 978-1846557286. 352p.

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After a five year hiatus due to a horrific auto accident, Greg Iles returns with what is undoubtedly his masterpiece, a book that is announced as the first of a trilogy.

Iles uses the Cage family, featured in many of his novels, as the vehicle to tell a monumental story of the old south from the 1970s until about the Katrina hurricane. Penn Cage’s father, Tom has been a doctor ministering to both whites and blacks for many years. He had, in the past, a short lived affair with his Afro American nurse, Viola Turner, who rather than compromising Tom’s marriage left the area to move to Chicago. Viola was raped by men belonging to a secret group within the Ku Klux Klan before leaving Mississippi for Chicago. Many years later she was dying of cancer. She returned to tell Tom and others that she had had a child in Chicago.

The question later arises if the child is Tom’s or as a result of the group rape. Viola dies and examination indicates that she did not pass away as a result of the cancer. Enemies of Tom Cage accuse him of murder citing the possibility of a mercy killing to ease Viola’s pain.

Penn Cage, the mayor of Natchez, takes on the task of proving that his father is not guilty of any crime, and in undertaking the investigation opens up a long history of criminal activity, including murder by the “Double Eagles,” the group within the KKK led by one of the richest and most powerful men in Mississippi. Iles takes us into an era when blacks were second class citizens and crimes against them were not considered in the same vein as against whites. Complete segregation was enforced by hate groups openly pursuing the practice and it appears that Penn’s task will involve opening the past in order to prove his father innocent of murder.

Natchez Burning is over 800 pages in length but proves to be completely engrossing, forcing the reader to continue reading far into the night. The book solves several problems, first of which is to prove Tom Cage innocent of murder but leaves many other details for the second and third book. This novel can be read as a stand alone, and is very satisfying as is, but does leave room for the other areas to be detailed in the following novels. Great book, extremely well done and certainly a return to normal for Iles.

4/14 Paul Lane

NATCHEZ BURNING by Greg Iles. William Morrow (April 29, 2014). ISBN 978-0062311078. 800p.

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Hilary Blum, a divorced mother of a boy with Asperger’s Syndrome, has just lost her job. Unable to force her ex-husband to pay her many expenses, she is at her wit’s end when she witnesses a freak accident in which a deer darts in front of the car in front of her, forcing the vehicle off the road. She runs down to the scene of the crash, finding the driver dead and next to him on the front seat, a satchel filled with money.

Suddenly caught between her inherent honesty and the need for money she throws the satchel out of the car into a dense group of trees to possibly come back for it. The amount of money in the bag could probably solve her financial problems immediately and also allow her to help her parents, who coincidentally have run into financial woes. Her decision to keep it plunges her into a maze of unforeseen consequences starting with a 20 year old murder, problems with the Russian Mafia, and into the company of a New York City detective that by coincidence has ties to the funds.

Gross ponders the subject of callous and unemotional kids which weighs heavily in the details of the novel. While he does not suggest that actions be taken to find these children and treat them, he does describe their abnormal reactions to people and situations in telling the story. The book is typical of Gross, well thought out, fleshed out characters and a plot that grabs and holds the reader. Well done, and awaiting his next novel with interest.

4/14 Paul Lane

EVERYTHING TO LOSE by Andrew Gross. William Morrow (April 22, 2014). ISBN 978-0061656002. 336p.