Turning Angel: A Novel (Penn Cage Novels)

Turning Angel: A Novel (Penn Cage Novels)

#1 New York Times bestselling author of Mississippi Blood and The Bone Tree keeps the secrets of the South alive in this “powerful…heartfelt…entirely gripping” ( The Washington Post ) novel of infatuation, murder, and sexual intrigue set in his hometown of Natchez, Mississippi. When the nude body of a beautiful young female student is found near the Mississippi River, the entire community is shocked—but no one more than Penn Cage, who discovers that his best friend, Drew Elliott, 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. Penn will do all he can to exonerate Drew, but in a town where the gaze of a landmark cemetery statue—the Turning Angel—never looks away, Penn finds himself caught on the jagged edge of blackmail, betrayal, and deadly violence. By the time Penn arrives at the shattering truth, this quiet Southern town will never be the same and “ Turning Angel will have you wondering where Greg Iles has been all your life” ( USA TODAY ). Greg Iles was the author of sixteen New York Times bestselling novels. He is best known for his Penn Cage series, the last of which is Southern Man . Iles’s novels have been made into films and published in more than thirty-five countries. He was also a member of the lit-rock group The Rock Bottom Remainders. He lived with his wife and children in Natchez, Mississippi, until his passing in 2025. Turning Angel Chapter 1 Some stories must wait to be told. Any writer worth his salt knows this. Sometimes you wait for events to percolate in your subconscious until a deeper truth emerges; other times you’re simply waiting for the principals to die. Sometimes it’s both. This story is like that. A man walks the straight and narrow all his life; he follows the rules, stays within the lines; then one day he makes a misstep. He crosses a line and sets in motion a chain of events that will take from him everything he has and damn him forever in the eyes of those he loves. We all sense that invisible line of demarcation, like an unspoken challenge hanging in the air. And there is some wild thing in our natures that makes us want to cross it, that compels us with the silent insistence of evolutionary imperative to risk all for a glinting shadow. Most of us suppress that urge. Fear stops us more often than wisdom, as in most things. But some of us take that step. And in the taking, we start down a path from which it is difficult and sometimes impossible to return. Dr. Andrew Elliott is such a man. I have known Drew since he was three years old, long before he was a Rhodes scholar, before he went to medical school, before he returned to our hometown of twenty thousand souls to practice internal medicine. And our bond runs deeper than that of most childhood friends. When I was fourteen, eleven-year-old Drew Elliott saved my life and almost lost his own in the process. We remained close friends until he graduated from medical school, and then for a long time—fifteen years, I guess—I saw him hardly at all. Much of that time I spent convicting murderers as an assistant district attorney in Houston, Texas. The rest I spent writing novels based on extraordinary cases from my career, which gave me a second life and time to spend with my family. Drew and I renewed our friendship five years ago, after my wife died and I returned to Natchez with my young daughter to try to piece my life back together. The early weeks of my return were swallowed by a whirlwind of a murder case, but as the notoriety faded, Drew was the first old friend to seek me out and make an effort to bring me into the community. He put me on the school board of our alma mater, got me into the country club, talked me into sponsoring a hot air balloon and a Metropolitan opera singer during Natchez’s annual festivals. He worked hard at bringing this widower back to life, and with much help from Caitlin Masters, my lover for the past few years, he succeeded. All that seems a distant memory now. Yesterday Drew Elliott was a respected pillar of the community, revered by many, held up as a role model by all; today he is scorned by those who venerated him, and his life hangs in the balance. Drew was our golden boy, a paragon of everything small-town America holds to be noble, and by unwritten law the town will crucify him with a hatred equal to their betrayed love. How did Drew transform himself from hero into monster? He reached out for love, and in the reaching pulled a whole town down on top of him. Last night his legend was intact. He was sitting beside me at a table in the boardroom of St. Stephen’s Preparatory School, still handsome at forty, dark-haired,