The Quiet Game by Greg Iles

I had just finished The Bone Tree and decided to go back and dig up some of the earlier books in the Penn Cage series by Greg Iles. In the Quiet Game, our hero, Penn, still recovering from the death of his beloved wife, takes his young daughter home to Natchez. There he unexpectedly gets sucked into the decades-old unsolved murder of a young black husband and father and runs into his first love, the daughter of his family's sworn enemy. This is also the book in which Penn meets future love interest newspaper editor Caitlin Masters.

Not nearly as long as the 2 most recent Penn Cage books, Quiet tells an engrossing story. And it's interesting to see how the author laid the groundwork for his later novels, now that I've read the series totally out of order.