...Bookfanatic

Let me start this by saying I don't read war stories. My parents lived this and that's enough for me. Luckily they were here in Canada so I know for them it could have been incredibly worse than it was, but my father saw 3 brothers go off to war and only 1 came home and the pain it caused my father and my grandmother was there in their hearts until the day they died. I loved them both dearly and that alone can reduce me to tears, but this is Greg Iles so I made the exception and while in some ways it was hard I'm glad I did it.

Black Cross is a work of fiction but at the same time it is so incredibly written this story just sucked me in from start to finish. It has literally been years since I read this book, close to 10 as memory serves and still I remember how strongly this story grabbed on to me. Over the course of a weekend I picked this book up on a Friday night and nothing could get me to put it down, my family was on their own until Sunday morning when they got up and came downstairs to find me reading the last few pages, after having snuck out of bed at barely 5 in the morning, I was crying like a baby. My kid was so flustered he went upstairs to get his dad because he thought there was something seriously wrong and all I could do was cry, point at this book and say "Oh my god, oh my god."

Black Cross does something that usually drives me crazy and that is the fact that it jumps between present day and the past in it's timeline not a lot and it is really, really well done. Usually this breaks up the flow of the story for me but in this case it was perfect and I had no problems with this style of writing.

I'm not going to go into the detail of the story because after nearly 10 years it's hard to do that with accuracy and for anyone interested in reading this amazing book why would I want to spoil it. I'm just going to say again I don't read war stories, but this was such a worthwhile exception and Greg Iles is such an amazing writer I can't imagine passing it over.