Southern Man

A contentious 2024 presidential election anchors the epic latest entry in Iles’s Penn Cage series (after Mississippi Blood). Former attorney Penn—now the mayor of Natchez, Miss.—is tending to his dying mother even as he fights his own battle with cancer. After deputies respond to a shooting at a hip-hop festival on the grounds of a former Mississippi plantation by raining bullets on the crowd, a Black liberation group takes credit for arsons at antebellum mansions across the South. Ultra-conservative radio host Robert E. Lee White capitalizes on these events as he launches his presidential campaign on a third-party ticket, promising he alone will bring order. Funded by dark money and popular on TikTok, White ignites Penn’s suspicions from the get-go. As his candidacy gains steam and he risks provoking the country into a full-blown race war, Penn enlists his daughter, Annie, to help him dig up and expose the rot beneath White’s campaign. Early on, Penn muses that “in the south, mysteries that date back 150 years retain the power to wreck families and destroy fortunes,” and that sense of haunted history permeates the novel. Certain plot strands wear out their welcome across the novel’s sprawling length, but in the end, Iles delivers an insghtiful, ambitious, and satisfying saga. This is a high water mark in a strong series. Agent: Dan Conaway, Writers House. (May)