True Evil by Greg Iles Review
February 20th, 2007 by admin
Released in December 2006, True Evil is the tenth novel by Greg Iles who was born in Germany in 1960 and now resides in Natchez, Mississippi; which is where some portions of the story told in this book take place.
After reading the book you may find yourself sleeping with one eye open, “just in case.”
Alex Morse is one of the key characters in the book. She is a top notch hostage negotiator with the FBI, maybe the best one they have ever had. But, during a tense situation, she went with her instincts but against direct orders. As a result, she was shot and another agent was killed.
Alex’s punishment was demotion to regular field work but she asks another agent to cover for her while she works on solving a different case that the agency doesn’t know she is working on and will get her booted out of the agency if they find out what she’s doing.
But Alex doesn’t care. She is trying to fulfill a promise she made to her sister as she lay on her deathbed. Her sister Grace’s stunning revelation as she was dying was that her husband had killed her and that Alex needed to prove it and take care of Grace’s son Jamie, whom Alex is very close to.
Alex’s investigation leads her to believe that a local divorce lawyer is someone how caught up in something evil because he has had several rich clients who spouses have all died suspicious deaths. The strange thing though is that most of the deaths are from cancer and it takes twelve to eighteen months for the spouses to die. Alex suspects some sort of exposure to a cancer causing agent.
Alex finds herself in Natchez, Mississippi, telling a doctor that she thinks he is going to be the next victim to die because his wife has recently visited the suspicious divorce lawyer. The doctor is very disbelieving but Alex needs to convince him to take the threat seriously and to work with her to help catch the murderer or murderers and to save his life.
The book has a good plot and has enough plausible information about viruses and ways to cause cancer at will to be scary because it’s not too hard to believe something like this could really happen. To me that’s the hallmark of a great story. There’s lots of suspense in the book along with several plot twists that had me practically holding my breath during several of the pages at the end of the book.
If you like fiction thriller books, this is a good one.
My rating (0-10 smilies): 8 ☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☻☺☺