James Lee Burke

Jolie Blon's Bounce

James Lee Burke

• 2003 Edgar–Novel nominee
• 2003 Macavity-Novel nominee
• 2002 Dagger shortlist
• 2002 Hammett nominee
• Score: 24.53

When a beautiful teenage girl is killed, the victim of a particularly savage rape, New Iberia, Louisiana, police detective Dave Robicheaux senses from the very start of the investigation that the most likely suspect, Tee Bobby Hulin, is not the actual killer. Though a drug addict and general ne’er-do-well, Hulin just doesn’t fit the profile for this kind of brutal crime.

But when another murder occurs—this victim a drugged-out prostitute who happens to be the daughter of one of the local mafia bigwigs—all clues once again point to Tee Bobby Hulin, and the cries for arrest become too loud to ignore. The dead girl’s father, however, prefers to take matters in his own hands and sets out to find—and punish—the killer himself.

But before Robicheaux can solve these crimes and bring the killer or killers to justice, he is forced to battle his own inner demons, including a painkiller addiction, a habit that begins as the result of a brutal and humiliating beating he suffers at the hands of the mysterious and diabolical character known as Legion. A fixture in the area for years,…

Cimarron Rose

James Lee Burke

• 1998 Edgar–Novel winner
• 1998 Barry-Novel nominee
• 1997 Hammett nominee
• Score: 22.48

Texas attorney and former Texas Ranger Billy Bob Holland has many secrets. Among them is Vernon Smother’s son, Lucas, a now-teenaged boy about whom few know the truth—Lucas is really Billy Bob’s illegitimate son. When Lucas is arrested for murder, Billy Bob must confront the past and serve as the boy’s criminal attorney.

Billy Bob knows the propensity of the town, Deaf Smith, Texas, to make scapegoats out of the innocent and to exploit and sexually use the powerless. During Lucas’s trial, Billy Bob realizes that he will have to bring injury upon Lucas as well as himself in order to save his son. As a result, Billy Bob incurs enemies that are far more dangerous than any he faced as a Texas Ranger.

With the same electric language and hard-edged style that brought James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels to the forefront of American crime fiction, Cimarron Rose explodes with a new, evocative setting that will establish Billy Bob Holland as James Lee Burke’s next great character.

The Tin Roof Blowdown: A Dave Robicheaux Novel

James Lee Burke

• 2008 Anthony-Novel nominee
• 2008 Dagger shortlist
• Score: 12.58

Hurricane Katrina has left the commercial district and residential neighborhoods of New Orleans awash with looters and predators of every stripe. The power grid of the city has been destroyed, New Orleans reduced to the level of a medieval society. There is no law, no order, no sanctuary for the infirm, the helpless, and the innocent. Bodies float in the streets and lie impaled on the branches of flooded trees. In the midst of an apocalyptical nightmare, Robicheaux must find two serial rapists, a morphine-addicted priest, and a vigilante who may be more dangerous than the criminals looting the city.

Filled with complex characters and depictions of people at both their best and worst, The Tin Roof Blowdown is not only an action-packed crime thriller, but a poignant story of courage and sacrifice that critics are already calling Burke’s best work.

Sunset Limited: A Dave Robicheaux Mystery

James Lee Burke

• 1998 Gold Dagger
• Score: 10.48

In a land soaked with sin, Dave Robicheaux is dueling with killers, ghosts, and a woman’s revenge….

The townspeople of New Iberia, Louisiana, didn’t crucify Megan Flynn’s father. They just didn’t catch whoever pinned him to a barn wall with sixteen-penny nails.

Decades later, Megan, now a world-famous photojournalist, has come back to the bayou, looking for cop Dave Robicheaux. It was Dave who found the body of labor leader Jack Flynn. The sight changed the boy, shaped him as a man. And after forty years, Robicheaux is still haunted by the bizarre unsolved slaying.

Now Megan’s return has stirred up the ghosts of the long-buried past, igniting a storm of violence that will rip apart lives of blacks and whites in this bayou county. And for a good cop with bad memories, hard desires, and chilling nightmares, the time has come to uncover the truth.

Dixie City Jam: A Dave Robicheaux Novel

James Lee Burke

• 1994 Hammett winner
• Score: 10.44

They’re out there, under the salt—the bodies of German seamen who used to lie in wait at the mouth of the Mississippi for unescorted American tankers sailing from the oil refineries of Baton Rouge out into the Gulf of Mexico. As a child, Dave Robicheaux had been haunted by the sailors’ images; then, as a young college student, he’d accidentally discovered one of their subs while scuba diving. Years later, in a New Orleans populated by desperate hustlers and millennium-watchers of all stripes, Robicheaux, a detective with the New Iberia sheriff’s office, finds himself and his family at serious risk, stalked for his knowledge of a watery burial ground by a mysterious man named Will Buchalter—a man who believes that the Holocaust was one big hoax.

American crime fiction’s “finest prose stylist” (Los Angeles Times) is at the peak of his powers in Dixie City Jam as he looks long and deep into the human heart of darkness.

Black Cherry Blues: A Dave Robicheaux Novel

James Lee Burke

• 1990 Edgar–Novel winner
• Score: 10.4

At the center of Burning Angel is Sonny Boy Marsallus, a fixer, a gambler, a lender of money to prostitutes who are trying to leave the life. But since Prohibition, the Giacano family has locked up the action in New Orleans and its surrounding parishes. When things get hot for Sonny Boy, he hightails it south of the border for parts unknown in El Salvador and Guatemala. When Sonny resurfaces in New Orleans, Detective Dave Robicheaux of the Iberia Parish sheriff’s office couldn’t be more surprised—that is, not until Sonny passes him a mysterious notebook for safekeeping that seems to contain dark secrets about his activities in Latin America. Robicheaux must wrestle with secrets closer to home as well when his help is enlisted by the Fontenot family, descendants of sharecroppers, whose claim to land they’ve lived on for almost one hundred years is jeopardized. Who wants the land so badly? And what of the longtime, clandestine affair between Moleen Bertrand, lord of the manor, and Ruthie Jean Fontenot, now reputed to be a local madam? As Dave determines to find out who’s honing…

Pegasus Descending: A Dave Robicheaux Novel

James Lee Burke

• 2007 Dagger shortlist
• Score: 6.57

A troubled young woman breezes into Detective Robicheaux’s hometown of New Iberia, Louisiana. She happens to be the daughter of his friend—a friend he witnessed gunned down in a bank robbery, a tragedy that forever changed Robicheaux’s life. The twists begin when Trish Klein—the only offspring of Robicheaux’s Vietnam-era buddy—starts passing marked hundred-dollar bills in local casinos. Is she a good kid gone bad? A victim’s child seeking revenge? A promiscuous beauty seducing everyone good within her grasp? And can Robicheaux make peace with his friend’s murder in time to figure out how a local mobster fits into all the schemes and death? Will his life be whole again when it has been shattered by so much tragedy?

Purple Cane Road

James Lee Burke

• 2000 LATimes–Mystery finalist
• Score: 6.5

Dave Robicheaux has spent his life confronting the age-old adage that the sins of the father pass onto the son. But what has his mother’s legacy left him? Dead to him since youth, Mae Guillory has been shuttered away in the deep recesses of Dave’s mind. He’s lived with the fact that he would never really know what happened to the woman who left him to the devices of his whiskey-driven father. But deep down, he still feels the loss of his mother and knows the infinite series of disappointments in her life could not have come to a good end.

While helping out an old friend, Dave is stunned when a pimp looks at him sideways and asks him if he is Mae Guillory’s boy, the whore a bunch of cops murdered 30 years ago. The pimp goes on to insinuate that the cops who dumped her body in the bayou were on the take and continue to thrive in the New Orleans area.

Dave’s search for his mother’s killers leads him to the darker places in his past and solving this case teaches him what it means to be his mother’s son. Purple Cane Road has the dimensions of a classic-passion, murder,…

Heartwood

James Lee Burke

• 1999 Hammett nominee
• Score: 6.49

A brilliantly layered novel of crime, character, and place from the two-time Edgar Award winner, Gold Dagger Award winner, and New York Times bestselling author of Sunset Limited.

Few writers in America today combine James Lee Burke’s lush prose, crackling story lines, and tremendous sense of history and landscape. In Cimmaron Rose, longtime fans of the Dave Robicheaux series found that the struggles of Texas defense attorney Billy Bob Holland show Burke at his best in exploring classic American themes—the sometimes subtle, often violent strains between the haves and the have-nots; the collision of past and present; the inequities in the criminal justice system.

Heartwood is a kind of tree that grows in layers. And as Billy Bob’s grandfather once told him, you do well in life by keeping the roots in a clear stream and not letting anyone taint the water for you. But in Holland’s dusty little hometown of Deaf Smith, in the hill country north of Austin, local kingpin Earl Deitrich has made a fortune running roughshod and tainting anyone who stands in his way. Billy…