Showing results by author "James Lee Burke" in All Categories

At the beginning of the 20th century, as America grapples with forces of human and natural violence more powerful than humanity has ever seen, Bessie Holland yearns for the love that she has never known. She finds a soulmate and mentor in a brilliant but tormented suffragette English teacher, who inspires Bessie to fight the forces of evil that permeate her world.

Clete Purcel—private investigator, ex-member of the New Orleans Police Department, and war veteran with a hard shell and just a few soft spots—is Dave Robicheaux’s longtime friend and partner in detective work. But he has a troubled past. When Clete leaves his car at the local car wash, only to return to find it ransacked by a group of thugs tied to the drug trade from Mexican cartels to Louisiana, it feels personal—his grandniece died of a fentanyl overdose, and his fists curl when he thinks of the dealers who sold it.

Released from prison after two years for manslaughter, Iry heads to Montana for a fresh start on a ranch owned by a prison buddy's father. He also hopes to nail down a song he's been working on, unable to get quite right. But soon new troubles bring tragic consequences, and it will take a lot more than a soulful tune to ease the pain.

In the fall of 1863, the Union army is in control of the Mississippi river. Much of Louisiana, including New Orleans and Baton Rouge, is occupied. The Confederate army is in disarray, corrupt structures are falling apart, and enslaved men and women are beginning to glimpse freedom. When Hannah Laveau, a formerly enslaved woman working on the Lufkin plantation, is accused of murder, she goes on the run with Florence Milton, an abolitionist schoolteacher, dodging the local constable and the slavecatchers that prowl the bayous.

Dave Robicheaux had begun to put the pieces of his broken life together again when an old friend turned up on his doorstep, dredging up old memories and new threats.

When Hackberry Holland became sheriff of a tiny Texas town near the Mexican border, he'd hoped to leave certain things behind: his checkered reputation, his haunted dreams, and his obsessive memories of the good life with his late wife, Rie. But the discovery of the bodies of nine illegal aliens, machine-gunned to death and buried in a shallow grave behind a church, soon makes it clear that he won't escape so easily.

Dave Robicheaux felt the bone-grinding pain rip through his body as the .45 did its damage. Through the agonizing haze that enveloped him, he heard an almost inhuman laugh - the hideous, victorious cackling of Jimmie Lee Boggs - a sound he would never forget. It had started out as an ordinary prisoner transfer, then turned into a blood bath when the convicted murderer got hold of a gun.

New York Times best-selling author James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels began with this first hard-hitting entry in the series. In The Neon Rain, Detective Robicheaux fishes a prostitute's corpse from a New Orleans bayou and finds that no one, not even the law, cares about a dead hooker.

"America's best novelist" ( The Denver Post) introduces his most evil character yet in the 20th thriller in the bestselling Dave Robicheaux series. In Light of the World, sadist and serial killer Asa Surrette narrowly escaped the death penalty for the string of heinous murders he committed while capital punishment was outlawed in Kansas. But the killer escapes from a prison transport van and heads to Montana - where an unsuspecting Dave happens to have gone to take in the sweet summer air.

In a startling departure, James Lee Burke has written an epic story of love, hate and survival set against the tumultuous background of the Civil War and Reconstruction. At the center of the tale are James lee Burke's own ancestors, Robert Perry, who comes from the slave-owning family of wealth and privilege, and Willy Burke, born of Irish immigrants, a poor boy who is as irreverent as he is brave and decent. Despite personal and political conflicts, both men join the Confederate Army, determined not to back down.

From its opening scene in revolutionary Mexico to the Battle of the Marne in 1918, and on to the bordellos and saloons of San Antonio during the reign of the Hole in the Wall Gang, House of the Rising Sun is an epic tale of love, loss, betrayal, vengeance, and retribution that follows Texas Ranger Hackberry Holland on his journey to reunite with his estranged son, Ishmael, a captain in the United States Army.

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.

Billy Bob Holland is a lawyer for the people of sunbaked Deaf Smith, in southern Texas. Although occasionally he is haunted by memories of a violent past, his life is serene—until a local guitarist, Lucas Smothers, lands in jail for raping and murdering a young woman. As Billy Bob gathers information to defend him, the evidence soon points to the son of a wealthy local businessman. In the ensuing battle, money is pitted against the law. But a deeper struggle also arises, for Lucas is Billy Bob’s illegitimate son.

Dave Robicheaux has been warned that he's on somebody's hit list, and now the homicide detective is trying to discover just who that is before he ends up dead. Meanwhile he has taken on the murder investigation of a young black girl found dead in the Bayou swamp. Robicheaux uncovers a web of corruption that leads him to a terrifying confrontation with the one horror he fears most of all.

Vietnam vet Dave Robicheaux has turned in his detective's badge, is winning his battle against booze, and has left New Orleans with his wife for the tranquil beauty of the Louisiana bayou. But a plane crash on the Gulf brings a young girl into his life - and with her comes a netherworld of murder, deception and homegrown crime.

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. As a result, he incurs enemies that are far more dangerous than any he faced as a Texas Ranger.

In this story of haves vs. have-nots, past vs. present, justice vs. the justice system, Texas defense attorney Billy Bob Holland has his work cut out for him.

Dave Robicheaux has never known what happened to his mother. He 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 killer leads him to the darker places in his past, and solving this case teaches him what it means to be his mother's son.

In this moving collection of short stories, James Lee Burke elegantly marries his flair for gripping storytelling with his urbane writing style and complex, fascinating character portraits. The backdrop of the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast proves to be a versatile setting for Burke's stories, which cover the scope of the human experience, from love and sex to domestic abuse, to war and death and friendship.

This James Lee Burke novel, featuring Son Holland - the great-grandfather of Burke's Billy Bob Holland - as he flees a Louisiana prison camp with a Native American woman and a fellow prisoner in tow, is now available in audio.