Greg Iles was born in 1960 in Germany, where his father ran the US Embassy medical clinic during the height of the Cold War. After graduating from the University of Mississippi in 1983, he performed for several years with the rock band Frankly Scarlet and was a member of the lit-rock group The Rock Bottom Remainders. The author of sixteen New York Times bestselling novels, he is best known for his Penn Cage series, the last of which is Southern Man. Iles passed away in 2025.