BOOK TIP

Cemetery Road

Greg Iles

Following his massive and masterful "Mississippi Burning" trilogy, author Greg Iles returns with a tense, complex and rocket-fueled stand-alone thriller called "Cemetery Road." Once again, Iles' recurrant themes of Deep South, small-town dymanics like race, fraternities of tight-knit power-elite who hold fiercely to a deep-rooted belief that life was better in the past, run rampant. But any recurring motifs are merely structural; the characters and octopi-tentacled plot threads are fresh and clever and delivered with brisk but literary skill. Whatever Pat Conroy captured about South Carolina, so does Iles with Mississippi. Snatch it up at once. Iles is a treasure.