Cemetery Road

Greg Iles fans may think they will miss Penn Cage when opening the author’s new novel, “Cemetery Road.”

After all the character of Penn Cage was the star of six Iles novels, including the epic “Natchez Burning” trilogy.

With “Cemetery Road,” Iles introduces a new protagonist, Marshall McEwan, but really there isn’t much difference between this character and Cage.

Like Cage, McEwan grew up in a small Southern town but left to pursue bigger fish in a larger pond. Tragic circumstances prompt McEwan to return to his hometown, and like Cage, the prodigal son quickly becomes the impetus for pursuing and revealing age-old inequities in his small Mississippi home town.

For Cage, it was with the racist, white supremacist Double Eagles. For McEwan, it’s the generations-old patriarchy of the Bienville Poker Club.

Both characters work with small-town newspapers. Both are embroiled in steamy romances. Both court trouble by daring to topple and expose the evil of the status quo.

McEwan and Cage even seem to think along the same moral lines. McEwan has a more troubled family life than Cage. But his story is as tragic, possibly more so, than Cage’s life. Between the debilitating illness of his estranged father, the murder of his surrogate father and flashbacks to the horrible deaths of his teenage brother and his infant son, the first hundred pages of “Cemetery Road” can be depressing.

But Iles fans will find a fast-paced book, a thrill ride of an epic that keeps the nearly 600 pages turning.

The similarities between McEwan and Cage are not a problem. They actually work, making the book easier to read without Cage. McEwan feels like a familiar character rather than a stranger thrust upon readers.