Book Review: The Quiet Game

Spoilers!

The less cynical of us like to imagine we live in a world where the truth wins out … eventually. Even if it takes generations, the truth is unassailable. In the fictional world, authors can at least ensure as much. Greg Iles’ 1999 book, The Quiet Game, which is his introduction to his Penn Cage character, takes readers to sweltering Natchez, Mississippi, where the racial tensions from the 1960s loom large still and greed and power control the narrative. I was saddened to learn last night while nearing the end of this book that Iles died at age 65. He was taken way too soon, but my thoughts are with his family. Thank you, Iles, for providing me entertainment with your words. Cancer is a bastard.

Penn Cage left Natchez for Houston to become a prosecutor and make money not possible in his hometown. He was good at it, at least by the measure of putting people in prison and even to death via lethal injection. He gave up the work to become a novelist, where he made even more money. Not long after, his wife, Sarah, died, leaving him and their daughter Annie behind. Penn is adrift in grief and doesn’t know how to help Annie with hers. So, he decides to be the proverbial prodigal son who returns home to Natchez to be with his parents. His father is a beloved doctor, his mother knows just what to do for Annie, and there’s Rose, their maid of 35 years who helped raised Penn.

In coming back to Natchez, though, Penn inadvertently steps into a powder keg that has sat dormant for 30 years tracing back to the car bombing of Delano “Del” Payton, a Black man, Korean War veteran, and an active member of the Civil Rights movement, in 1968. Despite FBI involvement, the case was never solved. When Penn offhandedly mentions the case — as a bit of town lore — to Caitlin, the publisher of the local newspaper and someone who seems to fancy Penn (and he her), she runs with it in the newspaper. The powder keg is awakened. That brings Del’s surviving widow and mother to Penn, asking him as a prosecutor to look into the case. Because this is a book with a long runway (624 pages!), Penn, of course, declines to do so. He’s back in town to help his daughter and he’s not even a prosecutor anymore. And it was more than 30 years ago. But it’s so interesting to thing about 1968 to 1999, when the book takes place. That would be like investigating a murder from 1994. As someone born in 1990, that doesn’t seem so long ago. Put another way, many people who put on white hoods and otherwise acted violently or at least harbored abhorrent thoughts about Black people, were merely in middle age at the turn of the century. We’re a young country. But I digress.

Later, Penn decides to take the case, initially for personal reasons: revenge against “Judge” Marston, a former district attorney who tried a malpractice lawsuit against Penn’s father 10 years after Del’s murder. Which is to say, he comes to believe Marston and his “fixer,” a dirty cop dying of cancer named Ray Presley, were involved in Del’s death. Thankfully, Paige eventually moves beyond that reason into that foundational force I mentioned at the top: uncovering the truth. The case reaches all the way up to the highest echelons of the “golden days” of the FBI in the 1960s to J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director for decades who tried to leverage, bribe, and lord over politicians, businessmen, and yes, civil rights icons like Martin Luther King, Jr. Hoover was close with Marston and in exchange for covering up his involvement in the Del murder, Marston would help Richard Nixon win Mississippi in the 1968 election. Hoover then classified and sealed the case on dubious “national security grounds.” Present-day FBI Director John Portman is all-too willing to continue what Hoover started playing the role of the “good German,” as Penn calls him. But why did Marston need Presley to kill Del (and Presley then blackmailed a Black man and Vietnam veteran, Ike Ransom, to actually do the deed)? Simple business in Marston’s eyes: A business development deal where the developer needed a Black man, any Black man, made an example of.

Complicating Penn’s uncovering of all the above, aside from ostensibly Portman and Presley sending assassins after Penn and potential witnesses who would testify (including burning down Penn’s parents’ home, killing Rose, and briefly kidnapping Annie to show they could), and even a bitter brother from one of Penn’s capital cases in Houston trying to kill him, is Livy, Marston’s daughter, the “belle of the ball,” as it were. She and Penn were high school sweethearts until she bizarrely ghosted him and left for college. He never knew why. She’s back in town, not-so-incidentally, as well. Penn can’t help himself, and despite somewhat seeing Caitlin at this juncture, sleeps with Livy. It comes out that she disappeared because she was pregnant with a child, who is also in Natchez. Her name is Jennifer Doe, age 20 now. At first, Jennifer and Penn think Jennifer is Livy and Penn’s child. Then, when Livy denies this, Penn thinks what I was thinking. Did Marston rape and impregnate his own daughter? We’d already heard how he’s a womanizer. My brain goes to the darkest of twists when I read books. I guess Penn’s did, too. Nope. Presley raped Livy and impregnated her. Livy didn’t want anything to do with the child, so, Marston essentially sold the baby for $35,000 to adoptive parents.

In order to loophole his way into a murder charge against Marston, Penn decides to slander Marston through Caitlin’s newspaper by declaring Marston had something to do with the murder. This leads to Marston, as Penn predicted, suing him. Penn thinks through discovery he can find more incriminating documents. At the actual trial of the civil suit, Livy, who is a lawyer, defends her dad. Even after everything she’s learned, including about the $35,000, she’s standing behind him. Despite the help from a former FBI agent testifying against Marston and Portman, Penn’s case is far from ironclad. In fact, Livy makes it seem like Penn held a grudge against Marston (he did) and the former FBI agent also had one against Portman (he did) and then they conspired to disparage each man’s professional reputation. It’s not until Jennifer comes back around that the truth wins out. In a bid to find her birth parents, she worked for a lawyer with mob connections and more importantly, he was the lawyer Marston worked with on her adoption; this lawyer is so paranoid, he tapes all of his conversations. When she quit the job, Jennifer took any tapes pertaining to Marston. One of those tapes captures the lawyer and Marston talking about the Del murder. Funny enough that this all ties back to Nixon (at least as far as Hoover’s motivation). Both Nixon and Marston were taken down by tapes.

The “quiet game” is a reference to people preferring to not shake the powder keg of racial tension, even if it means getting at the truth of a thing. But thanks to an intrepid prosecutor and journalist in Penn and Caitlin, respectively, who were willing to do the right thing, and sometimes even step over the line for that greater purpose, the truth won out and became known. Iles’ The Quiet Game made me think this was Iles’ attempt at John Grisham’s 1989 legal thriller A Time to Kill. Both are a tour-de-force through Mississippi (both authors are from Mississippi, in fact), including its lingering resentments, racism and violence, with white characters trying to do the right thing at the center of it all. Iles succeeds just as much as Grisham did with his debut novel. Penn Cage is a complex character, who I disagreed with at times (primarily around the death penalty and his lingering fixation on Livy, even during the Epilogue of the book, no less!), but who I couldn’t help but root for as he took on the Natchez system and did so from a place of love. He loves Natchez, also a complex place with a complex history, but he wasn’t willing, ultimately, to let Natchez’s most notorious unsolved crime continue to remain so.

Iles is an author with a lot to say in his books. Again, this was a 624-page book. I’m not sure I would cut anything. I enjoyed the deep dives into Natchez history and the characters therein. The story needed to breathe and in so doing, by the time Iles finally was inside a courtroom, this reader was on pins and needles to read the legal machinations. What a book and a start for the Penn Cage saga. I can’t wait to read more, albeit with a somber note that we will never have another Cage book, or Iles standalone book. Thank you again, Iles.