Reading this trilogy was my first experience reading Iles work, and having said this, I now plan to go back and look at his earlier pieces. Because I don't know how Penn appeared in previous works, I can not know if he is presented much differently in these three volumes. I can not know if Iles values are exaggerated. Having said that, however, I must believe that experiencing a near death situation is bound to change one's perception of life and that perception, if one is a write, will most likely become evident in one's work/ As such, I would think that probably the writing here is changed somewhat and possibly Penn's character and his father's as well. What I did notice, and what made me less fond of these pieces than I wanted to be, is that I felt Iles overwrote: Penn's father, Penn himself, and a few other characters seemed overdeveloped; they became almost too good, too perfect, and their foils, the evil that men did and the evil men themselves seemed to become more evil than was needed to make this trilogy complete and honest and true and real. I will not be popular for saying this, but I believe it, and perhaps it was coming to death's door that made Iles feel some urgency in expressing his ideas and developing his characters and themes as he did. I felt as the trilogy progressed, his ideas became almost unreal, to some degree impossible, and his protagonists almost too good to be true.