Purple Cane Road

By: James Lee Burke

Narrated by: Nick Sullivan

Dave Robicheaux has spent his life confronting the age-old adage that the sins of the father pass on to the son. But what was his mother's legacy? Dead to him since his youth, Mae Guillory has been shuttered away in the deep recesses of Robicheaux'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 a whiskey-driven father. But deep down, Dave still feels the loss of his mother and knows that 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 if he is the son of Mae Guillory, the whore a bunch of cops murdered thirty years ago. Her body was dumped in the bayou bordering Purple Cane Road, and the cops who left her there are still on the job.

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, and nearly heartbreaking poignancy -- wrapped in a wonderfully executed plot that surprises from start to finish.

Best story since the first 2 or 3 in the series

Terrible choice for a narrator. I had to force myself to listen to the first couple of chapters before I could get used to his voice enough to even begin to picture Dave. I'm glad other reviewers commented on the quality of the story. It was worth pushing through instead of skipping forward to the next book because the story was indeed excellent. Much better than the last 4 or 5. I did look first to see who would be narrating the rest of the series. I would have abandoned Dave if narrator wasn't changing back. And I was delighted to see that even Will Patton soon returns to finish out the series. He is by far the best Dave.

ok story, bad narration.

The story was ok, the narration was horrid. I wish I had read this one and not listened.

Great writing Hate the narration

God !!!! I can’t wait to get to the stories narrated by Mark Hammer.
He is the only narrator that I feel gives proper pronunciation of local places and gives the characters perfect dialects.

Great story. Worst ever reader!!

Please do NOT let him read anything by Burke again! It was very hard to listen to…

New Narrator

Nick Sullivan is a talented performer, who is challenged with the South Louisiana accent. Listening to him made me think this was a Jamaican story. By the end of the book, he had the correct cadence and the artfulness of Burke came through. The southern dialect is melodic & song like. Burke’s descriptive style of writing is reminiscent of Eudora Welty and does not lend itself to the clipped hard consonant cadence of other dialects.