Cheap thrills
At just cents a page, 'Cemetery Road' a sweeping Southern saga of murder, money and power

It’s going to cost you three cents a page to read Greg Iles’ 524-page paper-bound “Cemetery Road” released in hardback six years ago this month. But a few cents a page for Iles’ big-screen chimera will be a bargain if you’re looking for some time off from the bewildering state of world affairs. “Cemetery Road” is a luscious story built by a writer who knows better than most how to use the English language.

Cemetery Road is indeed a road in Iles’ story, so you needn’t anticipate anything distasteful, and it doesn’t matter why it’s called that. Iles’ characters are as real as the life we never notice around ourselves for the constant chatter in our heads, and his tableaux will leave you breathless. 

Iles is from Mississippi, and his stories are rooted in that part of the country. They are full of proud generations of benighted, particular and dissolute adults who believe that laws are made to delineate a place for minorities, women and the underclasses, same as always. And the men, those of the black sedans, bespoke suits, and manicured nails and shirts, are the arbiters of society. 

In New York City or Chicago, they would be called mobsters, but in Bienville, Miss., they are the glorified men of The Poker Club. They meet often as a hierarchical coterie, sipping whisky, smoking cigars and talking investments. Between the half dozen or so of them, they own everything but what they don’t want. They carry on with tradition: patronage, lending, and taking what and who they want. You wouldn’t want to know these men, but if you lived in Bienville, you would.

It’s the men of The Poker Club who welcome home Marshall McEwan after 35 years gone. An internationally celebrated journalist in Washington, D.C., Marshall put his career on hold to assist his mother with the failing health of the father, Duncan McEwan. A fourth-generation newspaperman and publisher of the Bienville Watchman, known as the “Conscience of Mississippi,” Duncan, was too grandiose to be much of a father. So it’s with a wince of resignation that Marshall comes home to close down the wheezing, century-old paper and wait to bury the flag bearer of a small, backwater Southern town.

And then, just as you don’t want it to turn out, Marshall’s boyhood mentor, archaeologist Buck Ferris, is murdered at the river’s edge where The Poker Club grandees are in negotiation with the Chinese to rebuild a paper mill. Everybody knows that Buck has found ancient Indian bones at the site, and it’s unspoken but clear that the Chinese are concerned with a low-profile deal to repatriate. It seems, though, that nobody told the unctuous profiteers that you never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel.

What transpires after Buck’s murder is the genius of Greg Iles and the reason to read “Cemetery Road.” This is a rich, textured story of the South and the lives of people who might as well be from Palermo, Sicily. “Cemetery Road” is the cheapest high you can get without risking prosecution.

Iles died at 65 in April 2024. This review of “Cemetery Road” on the two-year anniversary of the death of one of America’s finest novelist is an extolment of his courage and enormous talent. 

HarperCollins Publishers has “Cemetery Road” in paperback for $15.99 right now. Amazon of course has the paperback for $10.99, and Maria’s Bookshop will surely source the book for you and if shipping isn’t too prohibitive, offer their usual 15% “Murder Ink” discount. ■