Bestselling novelist Greg Iles was born in 1960 in Stuttgart, Germany, where his father was in charge of the medical clinic at the U.S. Embassy. He grew up in Natchez, Mississippi and graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1983. Iles founded the band Frankly Scarlet and played music for a living for a few years before deciding to write. He belongs to the author rock band known as The Rock Bottom Remainders. Iles's second novel, Black Cross, was awarded the Mississippi Author's Award for Fiction in 1995. His trilogy about Natchez, Mississippi (entitled the Penn Cage Trilogy), made the New York Times bestseller list in 2014 with the first book in the trilogy, Natchez Burning.