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Drew Elliott is one of the most respected physicians in the city of Natchez and he's been Penn Cage's friend ever since childhood. When the naked body of beautiful and brilliant high school senior Kate Townsend turns up snagged in a tree on the shore of a flooded creek, Cage can't believe that her murder could be connected to his lifelong friend. He's horrified when he discovers that 40-year-old Drew had been having a sexual relationship with the murdered girl for months. Soon Drew stands accused of the murder and Penn must risk his own life in his attempt to save his friend from the death penalty. Cage is a former prosecutor who has returned to his boyhood home of Natchez to write his best-selling novels. The TURNING ANGEL of the title refers not only to the city's funereal monument, an angel whose gaze seems to follow the viewer, but also to Kate herself, the perfect young woman who turns out to be jaded and precocious and not so perfect after all. Before it's over, the reader is drawn into a sordid web of promiscuous sex, encrypted pornographic pictures, easily available drugs and more violence than you'd find in most big cities' most outrageous gang wars. Along with his meditation on the demise of adolescence, Cage takes a look at the decaying small city he calls home. He catalogs the realities of unemployment, failed industries, poor schools and racial tension and concludes that none of the students currently attending the elite prep school where Kate was a student will return to make their homes in Natchez once they've finished college. Penn Cage resolves to run for mayor of the city because he sees his own candidacy as the city's best hope for survival. His likely opponent in the mayor's race is none other than his opponent in the courtroom, an ambitious and ethically-challenged black district attorney who sees an opportunity to rally the city's African American vote by convicting a white community leader of murder. Penn brings in a hired gun to run the case in the person of Quentin Avery, a former civil rights leader who has turned to a lucrative career trying personal injury cases. Curiously, in a book that purports to care very much about civil rights, Iles misspells Barack Obama's name and refers to the evil drug dealers from Biloxi only as "the Asians." I found TURNING ANGEL simultaneously compelling and repellent. Iles does a wonderful job with some very tight plotting and fast paced action during the first two-thirds of the book. In fact, it was very hard for me to put this mystery down, it was that gripping. The author evokes Natchez, Mississippi, with so much love and concern and vivid detail that I could not help but believe he cares deeply for the city and its future. The writing is graceful and fluid as the Mississippi River itself, which is never far from the reader's consciousness. On the other hand, it was hard not to be shout, "Shame on you!" at the author for blatantly exploiting the very situations over which he spends pages wringing his hands. The descriptions of the pornographic photos on Kate's flash drives are a little too prurient and the details of the rough sex Kate allegedly loved a little too graphic. Worse are the turgid scenes between Penn and his babysitter, Mia, whom he uses as an inside investigator, and who says things like, "I want to learn what I'm capable of. And the boys I know can't help," in her efforts to seduce Penn. All of this sounds a little too suspiciously like male fantasy run amok to give the book the gravitas it seems to be looking for. And while the plot zooms along at a supersonic pace for the first two-thirds of the book, it pretty much nose-dives into a compressed, nonsensical finish. TURNING ANGEL rocketed to the best-seller lists for many reasons, not all of them especially admirable, but if you're looking for a page-turner in the tradition of John Grisham, you could do worse.
Reviewed by Carroll Johnson, February 2006
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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