Book Club Discussion Questions
Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
Introduction
Shattered by grief and dreaming of vengeance, Penn Cage sees his
family and his world collapsing around him. The woman he loves is
gone, his principles have been irrevocably compromised, and his father,
once a paragon of the community that Penn leads as mayor, is about to
be tried for the murder of a former lover. Most terrifying of all, Dr. Cage seems bent on self-destruction. Despite Penn's experience as a prosecutor in major murder trials, his father has
frozen him out of the trial preparations--preferring to risk dying in prison to revealing the truth of
the crime to his son.
During forty years practicing medicine, Tom Cage made himself the most respected and
beloved physician in Natchez, Mississippi. But this revered Southern figure has secrets known
only to himself and a handful of others. Among them, Tom has a second son, the product of an
1960s affair with his devoted African American nurse, Viola Turner. It is Viola who has
been
murdered, and her bitter son--Penn's half-brother--who sets in motion the murder case against
his father. The resulting investigation exhumes dangerous ghosts from Mississippi's violent
past. In some way that Penn cannot fathom, Viola Turner was a nexus point between his father
and the Double Eagles, a savage splinter cell of the KKK. More troubling still, the long-buried
secrets shared by Dr. Cage and the former Klansmen may hold the key to the most devastating
assassinations of the 1960s. The surviving Double Eagles will stop at nothing to keep their past
crimes buried, and with the help of some of the most influential men in the state, they seek to
ensure that Dr. Cage either takes the fall for them, or takes his secrets to an early grave.
Questions for Discussion
- Greg Iles quotes from Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men at the start of
Mississippi Blood. This classic novel of the American South revolves around the
career of Willie
Stark, a back-country lawyer whose idealism is distorted over time by his
lust for power. Compare the two works, particularly Warren's depiction of the driven
Willie Stark with Iles's lead character, Penn Cage.
- What parallels can you draw between the hate group, the Double Eagles, and other
modern terrorist groups? What is the Double Eagles' ultimate purpose, and how and why
does the Cage family come in conflict with them in the novel?
- There have been many legendary courtroom scenes in Southern literature, Harper Lee's
To Kill a Mockingbird and the legal thrillers of John Grisham being two of the most
memorable. How do the courtroom scenes in Mississippi Blood compare?
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- How does the author develop themes of identity and belonging throughout the narrative?
- What role does the setting play in shaping the characters' decisions and relationships?
- Discuss how the ending reframes the events of the story. Were you surprised?
Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of William Morrow.
Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.
