Greg Iles was born in Germany in 1960, where his father ran the US Embassy Medical Clinic during the height of the Cold War. He spent his youth in Natchez, Mississippi, and graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1983.

Greg founded the band "Frankly Scarlet" and spent several years playing music for a living. The year after he was married, he gigged on the road for 50 weeks out of 52, and realized that this lifestyle was simply not sustainable with a family. He quit the band and began working eighteen hours a day on his first novel, Spandau Phoenix, a thriller about Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hess. When Greg sold this manuscript, he left the music business to complete the book.