James Lee Burke Books In Order

Dave Robicheaux Books In Publication Order

  1. The Neon Rain (1987)
  2. Heaven’s Prisoners (1988)
  3. Black Cherry Blues (1989)
  4. A Morning for Flamingos (1990)
  5. A Stained White Radiance (1992)
  6. In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead (1993)
  7. Dixie City Jam (1994)
  8. Burning Angel (1995)
  9. Cadillac Jukebox (1996)
  10. Sunset Limited (1996)
  11. Purple Cane Road (2000)
  12. Jolie Blon’s Bounce (2002)
  13. Last Car to Elysian Fields (2003)
  14. Crusader’s Cross (2005)
  15. Pegasus Descending (2006)
  16. The Tin Roof Blowdown (2007)
  17. Swan Peak (2008)
  18. The Glass Rainbow (2010)
  19. Creole Belle (2012)
  20. Light of the World (2013)
  21. Robicheaux (2018)
  22. The New Iberia Blues (2019)
  23. A Private Cathedral (2020)

Hackberry Holland Books In Publication Order

  1. Lay Down My Sword and Shield (1971)
  2. Rain Gods (2009)
  3. Feast Day of Fools (2011)
  4. Another Kind of Eden (2021)

Billy Bob Holland Books In Publication Order

  1. Cimarron Rose (1997)
  2. Heartwood (1999)
  3. Bitterroot (2001)
  4. In the Moon of Red Ponies (2004)

Weldon Holland Books In Publication Order

  1. Wayfaring Stranger (2014)
  2. House of the Rising Sun (2015)
  3. The Jealous Kind (2016)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Half of Paradise (1965)
  2. To the Bright and Shining Sun (1970)
  3. Two for Texas (1982)
  4. The Lost Get-Back Boogie (1986)
  5. White Doves at Morning (2002)

Short Stories/Novellas In Publication Order

  1. Texas City, 1947 (1992)

Short Story Collections In Publication Order

  1. The Convict and the Other Stories (1985)
  2. Jesus Out to Sea (2007)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. The Best American Mystery Stories 2008 (2008)
  2. Delta Blues (2009)
  3. The Best American Mystery Stories 2009 (2009)
  4. Books to Die For (2012)
  5. The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (2014)
  6. The Best American Mystery Stories 2018 (2018)

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Short Stories/Novellas Book Covers

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James Lee Burke Books Overview

The Neon Rain

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR JAMES LEE BURKE The Neon Rain Detective Dave Robicheaux has fought too many battles: in Vietnam, with killers and hustlers, with police brass, and with the bottle. Lost without his wife’s love, Robicheaux’s haunted soul mirrors the intensity and dusky mystery of New Orleans’ French Quarter the place he calls home, and the place that nearly destroys him when he becomes involved in the case of a young prostitute whose body is found in a bayou. Thrust into the world of drug lords and arms smugglers, Robicheaux must face down a subterranean criminal world and come to terms with his own bruised heart in order to survive.

Heaven’s Prisoners

In Heavens Prisoners, best selling author James Lee Burke introduces the gritty, tough and compassionate former police officer Dave Robicheaux in our first novel of this blockbuster series. Burkes muscular and relentless prose brings characters and events to life with the battering energy of a Bayou thunderstorm. Robicheaux, a recovering alcoholic, has retired to bayou country when a small plane full of passengersand troubledrops out of the sky near his boat. But as he rescues the only survivor, a girl he names Alafair, the crash soon plunges him into a netherworld of murder and deception. Trapped by events he cannot control, the usually quiet and gentle Robicheaux protects himself and his loved ones the only way he knows how: with a fist and a gun. Mark Hammers impassioned narration brings an earthy vitality to Robicheaux and the complex characters who inhabit his world.

Black Cherry Blues

BACK IN THE UNDERWORLD HE TRIED TO LEAVE BEHIND Haunted by the memory of his wife’s murder and his father’s untimely death, ex New Orleans cop Dave Robicheaux spends his days in a fish and tackle business. But when an old friend makes a surprise appearance, Robicheaux finds himself thrust back into the violent world of Mafia goons and wily federal agents. From the Louisiana bayou to Montana’s tribal lands, Robicheaux is running from the bottle, a homicide rap, a professional killer and the demons of his past. Rich with fascinating characters and dramatic plot twists, the audio debut of James Lee Burke and his Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux recalls the best of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe tough, complex and thoroughly entertaining.

A Morning for Flamingos

‘A highly spiced gumbo of vice, violence, voodoo’ Observer A routine assignment transporting two death row prisoners to their executions goes fatally wrong, leaving Dave Robicheaux brutally wounded and his partner dead. Obsessed with revenge, Dave is persuaded by the DEA to go undercover into the torrid sleepy depths of New Orleans, a volatile world of Mafia drug running and Cajun voodoo magic. He becomes irrevocably snarled in the nightmarish web surrounding Mafia don Tony Cardo and must put himself against his own worst fears in order to survive.

A Stained White Radiance

Cajun police detective Dave Robicheaux knows the Sonnier family of New Iberia their connections to the CIA, the mob, and to a former Klansman now running for state office. And he knows their past as dark and murky as a night on the Louisiana bayou. An assassination attempt and the death of a cop draw Robicheaux into the Sonniers’ dangerous web of madness, murder and incest. But Robicheaux has devils of his own. And they’ve come out of hiding to destroy the tormented investigator and the people he holds most dear. Filled with the usual Burke combination of brilliant action and a stunning novelistic theme, A Stained White Radiance will keep Burke’s fans riveted and win him many new ones.

In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead

PAST MEETS PRESENT IN THE LOUISIANA SWAMPS The image of the dead girl’s body lingered in detective Dave Robicheaux’s mind as he drove home. After seeing the young victim’s corpse, the last thing he needed to come across was a drunk driver. But when he saw the Cadillac fishtail across the road, Robicheaux knew the driver was in trouble. What Dave didn’t realize, was that by pulling the car over, he was opening his murder case wider than he could ever imagine. The driver, Elrod Sykes, in New Iberia to star in a movie, leads Dave to the skeletal remains of a black man that had washed up in the Atchafalaya swamp. So begins a mystery that takes Dave back to an unsolved murder a murder that he witnessed in 1957. Haunted by the past as he confronts the gruesome present day rape and murder of young prostitutes, Robicheaux must also contend with a new partner from the F.B.I., and the local criminal gentry. But for Dave, the answers he seeks lie somewhere in the bayou mist with the ghosts of soldiers long since forgotten…
A masterwork of detective fiction, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead is James Lee Burke’s most suspenseful work to date.

Dixie City Jam

A FORGOTTEN Na*zi SUB BRINGS OLD HATREDS TO THE SURFACE 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 discovered one of their sunken 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. A masterpiece of suspense, Dixie City Jam takes listeners deep into the human heart of darkness.

Burning Angel

A BRUTAL LEGACY OF CRUELTY AND HATE IS AWAKENED IN THE BAYOU

When Sonny Boy Marsallus returns to New Iberia after fleeing for Central America to avoid the wrath of the powerful Giacana family, his old troubles soon follow. Meanwhile Dave Robicheaux becomes entangled in the affairs of the Fontenot family, descendants of sharecroppers whose matriarch helped raise Dave as a child. They are in danger of losing the land they’ve lived on for more than a century.

As Dave tries to discover who wants the land so badly, he finds himself in increasing peril from a lethal, rag tag alliance of local mobsters and a hired assassin with a shady past. And when a seemingly innocent woman is brutally murdered, all roads intersect, and Sonny Boy is in the middle.

With the usual James Lee Burke combination of brilliant action and unforgettable characters, Burning Angel is the author at his best — showing that old hatreds and new ones are not that far apart.

Cadillac Jukebox

When former Klansman and piney woods outcast Aaron Crown is finally imprisoned for a decades old murder, it is to Detective Dave Robicheaux that he proclaims his innocence loudest. Crown seems to be a lightning rod for every kind of trouble that the state of Louisiana can unearth. A documentary film writer seeking to prove Crown’s innocence is found murdered; a button man for the New Orleans mob accuses Robicheaux of taking a pay off to ignore Crown. But it is when Buford LaRose scion of an old Southern family and author of a book on the Crown case is elected governor that Dave Robicheaux’s involvement with Aaron Crown deepens to a level he can barely fathom. And it is Buford’s social climbing wife, Karyn, with whom Robicheaux had an affair years before, who proves to be his most poisonous adversary. Filled with thrilling adventure, lightning paced action, and street smart realism, Cadillac Jukebox is a brilliant addition to Burke’s standout Dave Robicheaux series.

Sunset Limited

Detective Dave Robicheaux re turns to center stage in an incendiary new novel by James Lee Burke.A gripping tale of racial violence, class warfare, and the sometimes cruel legacy of Southern history, Sunset Limited is a stunning achievement, confirming Burke’s place as one of America’s premier stylists as well as master storytellers. ‘Not since Raymond Chandler has anyone so thoroughly reinvented the crime and mystery genre,’ said novelist Jim Harrison, and in Sunset Limited Burke continues to carve out new territory. As always in the fiction of James Lee Burke, the past impinges on the present: The forty year old crucifixion of a prominent labor leader named Jack Flynn remains an unsolved atrocity that has never been forgotten in New Iberia, Louisiana. When Flynn’s daughter, Megan, a photojournalist drawn to controversial subjects, returns to the site of her father’s murder, it quickly becomes clear that her family’s bloodstained past will not stay buried. Megan gives her old friend Dave Robicheaux a tip about a small time criminal named Cool Breeze Broussard, scarcely suspecting that the seemingly innocuous case will lead Robicheaux and his partner, Helen Soileau, into the midst of a deadly conspiracy. As New Orleans mobsters and mysterious hit men converge on his parish, Robicheaux soon finds that all the clues point back in time to the tortured death of Jack Flynn. Combining brilliant prose, crackling suspense, and an exquisite sense of character and place, Sunset Limited is a wrenching tale of historic violence and soiled redemption that reveals one of America’s finest novelists at his masterful best.

Purple Cane Road

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 who*re 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, and nearly heartbreaking poignancy wrapped in a wonderfully executed plot that surpises from start to finish.

Jolie Blon’s Bounce

James Lee Burke, acclaimed by critics as ‘America’s best novelist,’ ‘the Graham Greene of the bayou,’ and ‘a poet of the mystery novel,’ returns with his popular character, Dave Robicheaux, in a novel rich with atmosphere, ripe with menace, and filled with the kind of crackling dialogue that has made Burke a consistent New York Times best selling author. 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, Legion was once the overseer on a local sugarcane plantation and now gets by doing odd jobs. In temperament, however, he’s still the malicious and malevolent bully he always was, a man defined by evil and seemingly possessed with supernatural skills of survival. Added to the mix, and on the good guy side of the balance sheet, is Clete Purcel, a longtime buddy of Robicheaux’s and a confirmed boozer and womanizer. Clete comes to New Iberia for a visit and is quickly drawn into the struggle between the various forces of evil in the town, including Jimmy Dean Styles, a black man intent on maintaining his empire of corruption; Joe Zeroski, a trailer park mafioso with palatial aspirations and of course, Legion Guidry, the devil incarnate, in whom Robicheaux finds himself facing a challenge and an enemy unlike any he has ever known. And soon, what began as a duel of wits has turned into a dance of death. Gothic, dense, brutal, touching, and always compelling, Jolie Blon’s Bounce is classic storytelling from a writer who has been dubbed ‘the Faulkner of crime fiction.’

Last Car to Elysian Fields

For Dave Robicheaux, there is no easy passage home. New Orleans, and the memories of his life in the Big Easy, will always haunt him. So to return there as he does in Last Car to Elysian Fields means visiting old ghosts, exposing old wounds, opening himself up to new, yet familiar, dangers. When Robicheaux, now a police officer based in the somewhat quieter Louisiana town of New Iberia, learns that an old friend, Father Jimmie Dolan, a Catholic priest always at the center of controversy, has been the victim of a particularly brutal assault, he knows he has to return to New Orleans to investigate, if only unofficially. What he doesn’t realize is that in doing so he is inviting into his life and into the lives of those around him an ancestral evil that could destroy them all. The investigation begins innocently enough. Assisted by good friend and P.I. Clete Purcel, Robicheaux confronts the man they believe to be responsible for Dolan’s beating, a drug dealer and po*rno star named Gunner Ardoin. The confrontation, however, turns into a standoff as Clete ends up in jail and Robicheaux receives an ominous warning to keep out of New Orleans’ affairs. Meanwhile, back in New Iberia, more trouble is brewing: Three local teenage girls are killed in a drunk driving accident, the driver being the seventeen year old daughter of a prominent physician. Robicheaux traces the source of the liquor to one of New Iberia’s ‘daiquiri windows,’ places that sell mixed drinks from drive by windows. When the owner of the drive through operation is brutally murdered, Robicheaux immediately suspects the grief crazed father of the dead teen driver. But his assumption is challenged when the murder weapon turns up belonging to someone else. The trouble continues when Father Jimmie asks Robicheaux to help investigate the presence of a toxic landfill near St. James Parish in New Orleans, which in turn leads to a search for the truth behind the disappearance many years before of a legendary blues musician and composer. Tying together all these seemingly disparate threads of crime is a maniacal killer named Max Coll, a brutal, brilliant, and deeply haunted hit man sent to New Orleans to finish the job on Father Dolan. Once Coll shows up, it becomes clear that Dave Robicheaux will be forced to ignore the warning to stay out of New Orleans, and he soon finds himself drawn deeper into a viper’s nest of sordid secrets and escalating violence that sets him up for a confrontation that echoes down the lonely corridors of his own unresolved past. A masterful exploration of the troubled side of human nature and the darkest corners of the heart, and filled with the kinds of unforgettable characters that are the hallmarks of his novels, Last Car to Elysian Fields is James Lee Burke in top form in the kind of lush, atmospheric thriller that his fans have come to expect from the master of crime fiction.

Crusader’s Cross

A New York Times Bestseller
A Two-time Edgar Award-winning Author

Critically acclaimed and bestselling crime writer James Lee Burke returns to Louisiana where his ever-popular hero, Dave Robicheaux, sleuths his way through a hotbed of sin and uncertainty. Back in the innocent days of the 1950s when Robicheaux and his brother, Jimmie, met Ida Durbin, Jimmie fell for her hard – not knowing she was a prostitute on infamous Post Office Street, with ties to the mob. Then Ida was abducted and never seen again. Now, decades later, Robicheaux is asking questions and a couple of redneck deputy sheriffs make it clear that asking questions is a dangerous game. With a series of horrifying murders and the sudden appearance of Valentine Chalons and his sister, Honoria, a disturbed and deeply alluring woman, Robicheaux is soon involved not only with the Chalons family but with the murderous energies of the New Orleans underworld.

James Lee Burke is the author of over twenty-two novels, including New York Times bestsellers Bitterroot, Sunset Limited, Cimarron Rose, Cadillac Jukebox, Burning Angel, Dixie City Jam, and Purple Cane Road. James Lee Burke lives in Missoula, Montana, and New Iberia, Louisiana.

Pegasus Descending

Detective Dave Robicheaux is facing the most painful and dangerous case of his career. A troubled young woman breezes into his hometown of New Iberia, Louisiana. She happens to be the daughter of Robicheaux’s onetime best friend a friend he witnessed gunned down in a bank robbery, a tragedy that forever changed Robicheaux’s life.

In Pegasus Descending, James Lee Burke again explores psyches as much as evidence, and tries to make sense of human behavior as well as of his characters’ crimes. Richly atmospheric, frightening in its sudden violence, and replete with the sort of puzzles only the best crime fiction creates, Burke’s latest novel is an unforgettable roller coaster of passion, surprise, and regret.

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 how does her behavior relate to the apparent suicide of another ‘good’ girl, an ace student named Yvonne Darbonne, who apparently participated in a college frat orgy before her death?

Can Robicheaux make his peace with the demons that have haunted him since his friend’s murder so many years ago? Can he figure out how a local mobster fits into all the schemes and deaths? Can Robicheaux’s life be whole again when it has been shattered by so much tragedy?

Once again, Burke proves why he is the virtual poet laureate of southern Louisiana, and why his novels, especially those featuring Dave Robicheaux, stand as brilliant literature and entertainment for our time.

The Tin Roof Blowdown

In the waning days of summer, 2005, a storm with greater impact than the bomb that struck Hiroshima peels the face off southern Louisiana.

This is the gruesome reality Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Detective Dave Robicheaux discovers as he is deployed to New Orleans. As James Lee Burke’s new novel, The Tin Roof Blowdown, begins, Hurricane Katrina has left the commercial district and residential neighborhoods 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.

In a singular style that defies genre, James Lee Burke has created a hauntingly bleak picture of life in New Orleans after Katrina. 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.

Swan Peak

In the waning days of summer, 2005, a storm with greater impact than the bomb that struck Hiroshima peels the face off southern Louisiana.

This is the gruesome reality Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Detective Dave Robicheaux discovers as he is deployed to New Orleans. As James Lee Burke’s new novel, The Tin Roof Blowdown, begins, Hurricane Katrina has left the commercial district and residential neighborhoods 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.

In a singular style that defies genre, James Lee Burke has created a hauntingly bleak picture of life in New Orleans after Katrina. 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.

The Glass Rainbow

James Lee Burke’s eagerly awaited new novel finds Detective Dave Robicheaux back in New Iberia, Louisiana, and embroiled in the most harrowing and dangerous case of his career. Seven young women in neighboring Jefferson Davis Parish have been brutally murdered. While the crimes have all the telltale signs of a serial killer, the death of Bernadette Latiolais, a high school honor student, doesn t fit: she is not the kind of hapless and marginalized victim psychopaths usually prey upon. Robicheaux and his best friend, Clete Purcel, confront Herman Stanga, a notorious pimp and crack dealer whom both men despise. When Stanga turns up dead shortly after a fierce beating by Purcel, in front of numerous witnesses, the case takes a nasty turn, and Clete s career and life are hanging by threads over the abyss. Adding to Robicheaux s troubles is the matter of his daughter, Alafair, on leave from Stanford Law to put the finishing touches on her novel. Her literary pursuit has led her into the arms of Kermit Abelard, celebrated novelist and scion of a once prominent Louisiana family whose fortunes are slowly sinking into the corruption of Louisiana s subculture. Abelard s association with bestselling ex convict author Robert Weingart, a man who uses and discards people like Kleenex, causes Robicheaux to fear that Alafair might be destroyed by the man she loves. As his daughter seems to drift away from him, he wonders if he has become a victim of his own paranoia. But as usual, Robicheaux s instincts are proven correct and he finds himself dealing with a level of evil that is greater than any enemy he has confronted in the past. Set against the backdrop of an Edenic paradise threatened by pernicious forces, James Lee Burke s The Glass Rainbow is already being hailed as perhaps the best novel in the Robicheaux series.

Lay Down My Sword and Shield

Includes a Bonus MP3 CD of James Lee Burke’s Cimarron Rose!

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.

As Hack and Deputy Sheriff Pam Tibbs attempt to untangle the threads of this complex and grisly case, a damaged young Iraq veteran, Pete Flores, and his girlfriend, Vikki Gaddis, are running for their lives, hoping to outwit the bloodthirsty criminals who want to kill Pete for his involvement in the murders. The only trouble is, Pete doesn’t know who he’s running from: drunk and terrified, he fled the scene of the crime when the shooting began. And there’s a long list of people who want Pete and Vikki dead: crime boss Hugo Cistranos, who hired Pete for the operation; Nick Dolan, a strip club owner and small time gangster with revenge on his mind; and a mysterious God fearing serial killer for hire known as Preacher Jack Collins, with enigmatic motives of his own.

With the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and a host of cold blooded killers on Pete and Vikki’s trail, it’s up to Sheriff Holland to find them first and figure out who’s behind the mass murder before anyone else ends up dead. In this thrilling and intricate work, James Lee Burke has once again proven himself a master storyteller and a perceptive chronicler of the darkest corners of the human heart.

Rain Gods

Includes a Bonus MP3 CD of James Lee Burke’s Cimarron Rose!

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.

As Hack and Deputy Sheriff Pam Tibbs attempt to untangle the threads of this complex and grisly case, a damaged young Iraq veteran, Pete Flores, and his girlfriend, Vikki Gaddis, are running for their lives, hoping to outwit the bloodthirsty criminals who want to kill Pete for his involvement in the murders. The only trouble is, Pete doesn’t know who he’s running from: drunk and terrified, he fled the scene of the crime when the shooting began. And there’s a long list of people who want Pete and Vikki dead: crime boss Hugo Cistranos, who hired Pete for the operation; Nick Dolan, a strip club owner and small time gangster with revenge on his mind; and a mysterious God fearing serial killer for hire known as Preacher Jack Collins, with enigmatic motives of his own.

With the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and a host of cold blooded killers on Pete and Vikki’s trail, it’s up to Sheriff Holland to find them first and figure out who’s behind the mass murder before anyone else ends up dead. In this thrilling and intricate work, James Lee Burke has once again proven himself a master storyteller and a perceptive chronicler of the darkest corners of the human heart.

Feast Day of Fools

In his celebrated thirtieth novel, James Lee Burke returns to the Texas border town setting of his bestseller Rain Gods, a riveting novel that evokes past American greats, such as Steinbeck and Cain Lincoln Journal Star. Now, a monstrous killer presumed dead is very much alive…
and Sheriff Hackberry Holland must fight for survival his own, and that of the citizens he’s sworn to protect. Still mourning the loss of his cherished wife and navigating an almost romance with his decades younger deputy, Pam Tibbs, Hackberry feeds off the deeds of evil men to keep his own demons at bay. When alcoholic ex boxer Danny Boy Lorca witnesses a man tortured to death in the desert, Hack s investigation leads him to Anton Ling, a regal, mysterious Chinese woman known for sheltering illegals. Ling denies having seen the victim or the perpetrators, but there is something in her steely demeanor and aristocratic beauty that seduces Hackberry into overlooking that she is just as dangerous as the men she harbors. Danger increases tenfold with the return of serial murderer Preacher Jack Collins, who has reemerged with a calm, single minded zeal for killing more terrifying than the muzzle flash of his signature machine gun. But this time, he and Sheriff Holland may have a common enemy.

Cimarron Rose

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.

Heartwood

Following his acclaimed bestseller ‘Purple Cane Road,’ James Lee Burke returns with a triumphant tour de force. Set in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, home to celebrities seeking to escape the pressures of public life, as well as to xenophobes dedicated to establishing a bulkhead of patriotic paranoia, Burke’s novel features Billy Bob Holland, former Texas Ranger and now a Texas based lawyer, who has come to Big Sky Country for some fishing and ends up helping out an old friend in trouble. And big trouble it is, not just for his friend but for Billy Bob himself in the form of Wyatt Dixon, a recent prison parolee sworn to kill Billy Bob as revenge for both his imprisonment and his sister’s death, both of which he blames on the former Texas lawman. As the mysteries multiply and the body count mounts, the reader is drawn deeper into the tortured mind of Billy Bob Holland, a complex hero tormented by the mistakes of his past and driven to make things all things right. But beneath the guise of justice for the weak and downtrodden lies a tendency for violence that at times becomes more terrifying than the danger he is trying to eradicate. As ‘USA Today’ noted in discussing the parallels between Billy Bob Holland and Burke’s other popular series hero, David Robicheaux, ‘Robicheaux and Holland are two of a kind, white hat heroes whose essential goodness doesn’t keep them from fighting back. The two series describe different landscapes, but one theme remains constant: the inner conflict when upright men are provoked into violence in defense of hearth, home, women, and children. There are plenty of parallels. Billy Bob is an ex Texas Ranger; Dave is an ex New Orleanscop. Dave battles alcoholism and the ghosts of Vietnam; Billy Bob actually sees ghosts, including the Ranger he accidentally gunned down…
. But most of all, both protagonists hold a vision of a pure and simple life.’ In ‘Bitterroot,’ with its rugged and vivid setting, its intricate plot, and a set of remarkable, unforgettable characters, and crafted with the lyrical prose and the elegiac tone that have inspired many critics to compare him to William Faulkner, James Lee Burke has written a thriller destined to surpass the success of his previous novels.

Bitterroot

Following his acclaimed bestseller ‘Purple Cane Road,’ James Lee Burke returns with a triumphant tour de force. Set in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, home to celebrities seeking to escape the pressures of public life, as well as to xenophobes dedicated to establishing a bulkhead of patriotic paranoia, Burke’s novel features Billy Bob Holland, former Texas Ranger and now a Texas based lawyer, who has come to Big Sky Country for some fishing and ends up helping out an old friend in trouble. And big trouble it is, not just for his friend but for Billy Bob himself in the form of Wyatt Dixon, a recent prison parolee sworn to kill Billy Bob as revenge for both his imprisonment and his sister’s death, both of which he blames on the former Texas lawman. As the mysteries multiply and the body count mounts, the reader is drawn deeper into the tortured mind of Billy Bob Holland, a complex hero tormented by the mistakes of his past and driven to make things all things right. But beneath the guise of justice for the weak and downtrodden lies a tendency for violence that at times becomes more terrifying than the danger he is trying to eradicate. As ‘USA Today’ noted in discussing the parallels between Billy Bob Holland and Burke’s other popular series hero, David Robicheaux, ‘Robicheaux and Holland are two of a kind, white hat heroes whose essential goodness doesn’t keep them from fighting back. The two series describe different landscapes, but one theme remains constant: the inner conflict when upright men are provoked into violence in defense of hearth, home, women, and children. There are plenty of parallels. Billy Bob is an ex Texas Ranger; Dave is an ex New Orleanscop. Dave battles alcoholism and the ghosts of Vietnam; Billy Bob actually sees ghosts, including the Ranger he accidentally gunned down…
. But most of all, both protagonists hold a vision of a pure and simple life.’ In ‘Bitterroot,’ with its rugged and vivid setting, its intricate plot, and a set of remarkable, unforgettable characters, and crafted with the lyrical prose and the elegiac tone that have inspired many critics to compare him to William Faulkner, James Lee Burke has written a thriller destined to surpass the success of his previous novels.

In the Moon of Red Ponies

‘James Lee Burke tells a story in a style all his own, in language that’s alive, electric. He’s a master at setting mood, laying in atmosphere, all with quirky dialogue that’s a delight.’ Elmore Leonard In James Lee Burke’s last novel featuring Billy Bob Holland, Bitterroot, the former Texas Ranger left his home state to help a friend threatened by the most dangerous sociopath Billy Bob had ever faced. After vanquishing a truly iniquitous collection of violent individuals, Billy moved his family to west Montana and hung out a shingle for his law practice. But in In the Moon of Red Ponies, he discovers that jail cells have revolving doors and that the government he had sworn to serve may have become his enemy. His first client in Missoula is Johnny American Horse, a young activist for land preservation and the rights of Native Americans. Johnny is charged with the murder of two mysterious men who seem to have recently tried to kill Johnny themselves, or at least scare him off his political causes. As Billy Bob investigates, he discovers a web of intrigue surrounding the case and its players: Johnny’s girlfriend, Amber Finley, as reckless as she is defiant and the daughter of one of Montana’s U.S. senators; Darrel McComb, a Missoula police detective who is obsessed with Amber; and Seth Masterson, an enigmatic government agent whose presence in town makes Billy Bob wonder why Washington has become so concerned with an obscure murder case on the fringes of the Bitterroot Mountains. As complications mount and the dead bodies multiply, Billy Bob is drawn closer to the truth behind Johnny American Horse’s arrest and discovers a greater danger to himself and to his whole family. How Billy Bob strikes back at evil and protects his kin is the masterful triumph of In the Moon of Red Ponies. Beautifully written, with an intriguing plot and characters whose conflicts seem as real as life itself, this novel shows James Lee Burke again in the top form that has made him a critical favorite and a national bestseller.

Half of Paradise

‘A twisted spar whistled through the air like a cannon ball, cutting through the tops of two maple trees. The air became black with coal dust. As the last echo of the explosion began to thin in the distance, the boy could hear the leaves from the trees settling to the ground around him…
‘In TO THE BRIGHT AND SHINING SUN James Lee Burke brings his brilliant feel for time and place to a stunning story of Appalachia in the early 1960s. Here Perry Woodson Hatfield James, torn between family honour and the lure of seedy ‘watering holes’ must somehow survive the tempestuous journey from boyhood to manhood and escape the dark heritage of the Cumberland Mountains in this ‘surging, bitter novel as authentic as moonshine’ New York Times

To the Bright and Shining Sun

‘A twisted spar whistled through the air like a cannon ball, cutting through the tops of two maple trees. The air became black with coal dust. As the last echo of the explosion began to thin in the distance, the boy could hear the leaves from the trees settling to the ground around him…
‘In To the Bright and Shining Sun James Lee Burke brings his brilliant feel for time and place to a stunning story of Appalachia in the early 1960s. Here Perry Woodson Hatfield James, torn between family honour and the lure of seedy ‘watering holes’ must somehow survive the tempestuous journey from boyhood to manhood and escape the dark heritage of the Cumberland Mountains in this ‘surging, bitter novel as authentic as moonshine’ New York Times

Two for Texas

The Lost Get Back Boogie appeared to wide acclaim in 1986, James Lee Burke had been out of print in cloth for thirteen years and his fifth novel had received a record 111 rejection letters. ‘LSU Press put me back in the game and turned my career around,’ Burke says. The novels and stories Burke had written during those years of rejection eventually became the stuff of the Dave Robicheaux series, which has earned him two Edgar Awards. The novel’s title is also the name of the song that Iry Paret a honky tonk musician, Korean vet, and ex con wants to write to hold his memories of a ‘more uncomplicated time,’ before the war, before prison. The book opens the day thirty year old Iry leaves Louisiana s Angola state penitentiary, after serving two years for manslaughter, and follows him to Montana, where he hopes to stay cool and out of trouble by working hard on a ranch owned by the father of his prison pal, Buddy Riordan. Iry finds the fresh start he seeks, joins a weekend band, and even falls in love. But the Riordan family s problems deal Iry a new sort of trouble with some ultimately tragic consequences. The Lost Get Back Boogie is a novel about loyalty and friendship, betrayal and loss. It is about essentially good people and their attempts to define the value of their lives and to find their place in a changing, complicated world. And it is the work of James Lee Burke at the top of his form.

The Lost Get-Back Boogie

The Lost Get Back Boogie appeared to wide acclaim in 1986, James Lee Burke had been out of print in cloth for thirteen years and his fifth novel had received a record 111 rejection letters. ‘LSU Press put me back in the game and turned my career around,’ Burke says. The novels and stories Burke had written during those years of rejection eventually became the stuff of the Dave Robicheaux series, which has earned him two Edgar Awards. The novel’s title is also the name of the song that Iry Paret a honky tonk musician, Korean vet, and ex con wants to write to hold his memories of a ‘more uncomplicated time,’ before the war, before prison. The book opens the day thirty year old Iry leaves Louisiana s Angola state penitentiary, after serving two years for manslaughter, and follows him to Montana, where he hopes to stay cool and out of trouble by working hard on a ranch owned by the father of his prison pal, Buddy Riordan. Iry finds the fresh start he seeks, joins a weekend band, and even falls in love. But the Riordan family s problems deal Iry a new sort of trouble with some ultimately tragic consequences. The Lost Get Back Boogie is a novel about loyalty and friendship, betrayal and loss. It is about essentially good people and their attempts to define the value of their lives and to find their place in a changing, complicated world. And it is the work of James Lee Burke at the top of his form.

White Doves at Morning

For years, critics have acclaimed the power of James Lee Burke’s writing, the luminosity of his prose, the psychological complexity of his characters, the richness of his landscapes. Over the course of twenty novels and one collection of short stories, he has developed a loyal and dedicated following among both critics and general readers. His thrillers, featuring either Louisiana cop Dave Robicheaux or Billy Bob Holland, a hardened Texas based lawyer, have consistently appeared on national bestseller lists, making Burke one of America’s most celebrated authors of crime fiction. Now, in a startling and brilliantly successful departure, Burke has written a historical novel an epic story of love, hate, and survival set against the tumultuous background of the Civil War and Reconstruction. At the center of the novel are James Lee Burke’s own ancestors, Robert Perry, who comes from a slave owning family of wealth and privilege, and Willie Burke, born of Irish immigrants, a poor boy who is as irreverent as he is brave and decent. Despite their personal and political conflicts with the issues of the time, both men join the Confederate Army, choosing to face ordeal by fire, yet determined not to back down in their commitment to their moral beliefs, to their friends, and to the abolitionist woman with whom both have become infatuated. One of the most compelling characters in the story, and the catalyst for much of its drama, is Flower Jamison, a beautiful young black slave befriended, at great risk to himself, by Willie and owned by and fathered by, although he will not admit it Ira Jamison. Owner of Angola Plantation, Ira Jamison is a true son of the Old South and alsoa ruthless businessman, who, after the war, returns to the plantation and re energizes it by transforming it into a penal colony, which houses prisoners he rents out as laborers to replace the slaves who have been emancipated. Against all local law and customs, Flower learns from Willie to read and write, and receives the help and protection of Abigail Dowling, a Massachusetts abolitionist who had come south several years prior to help fight yellow fever and never left, and who has attracted the eye of both Willie and Robert Perry. These love affairs are not only fraught with danger, but compromised by the great and grim events of the Civil War and its aftermath. As in all of Burke’s writings, ‘White Doves at Morning‘ is full of wonderful, colorful, unforgettable villains. Some, like Clay Hatcher, are pure ‘white trash’ considered the lowest of the low, they were despised by the white ruling class and feared by former slaves. From their ranks came the most notorious of the vigilante groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia. Most villainous of all, though, are the petty and mean minded Todd McCain, owner of New Iberia’s hardware store, and the diabolically evil Rufus Atkins, former overseer of Angola Plantation and the man Jamison has placed in charge of his convict labor crews. Rounding out this unforgettable cast of characters are Carrie LaRose, madam of New Iberia’s house of ill repute, and her ship’s captain brother Jean Jacques LaRose, Cajuns who assist Flower and Abigail in their struggle to help the blacks of the town. With battle scenes at Shiloh and in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia that no reader will everforget, and set in a time of upheaval that affected all men and all women at all levels of society, ‘White Doves at Morning‘ is an epic worthy of America’s most tragic conflict, as well as a book of substance, importance, and genuine originality, one that will undoubtedly come to be regarded as a masterpiece of historical fiction.

Texas City, 1947

A junior high level textbook presenting Ohio’s history, with suggested activities and projects, and information on ethnic composition, state government, and life in Ohio today.

The Convict and the Other Stories

THE COLLECTION NO CRIME FICTION FAN SHOULD BE WITHOUT THE ESSENTIAL SHORT STORIES OF JAMES LEE BURKE ‘America’s best novelist’ The Denver Post , two time Edgar Award winner James Lee Burke is renowned for his lush, suspense charged portrayals of the Deep South the people, the crime, the hope and despair infused in the bayou landscape. This stunning anthology takes us back to where Burke’s heart and soul beat the steamy, seamy Gulf Coast in complex and fascinating tales that crackle with violence and menace, meshing his flair for gripping storytelling with his urbane writing style.

Jesus Out to Sea

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

The Best American Mystery Stories 2008

A must read for anyone who cares about crime stories. BooklistThe award winning author and Emmy nominated television writer George Pelecanos serves as editor of the twelfth installment of this genre expanding anthology, featuring twenty of the past year’s most enthralling, suspenseful, and slyly illuminating mystery stories.A cut and dried case for a wily crime scene reconstructionist is turned on its head in Michael Connelly s Mulholland Dive. A terrible secret shared between two childhood friends resurfaces decades later as one of them lies on her deathbed in Alice Munro s masterful Child s Play. James Lee Burke tells the haunting tale of a Hurricane Katrina evacuee who unexpectedly finds comfort from an unimaginable loss in Mist. And in Holly Goddard Jones s Proof of God, a young man s car is repeatedly vandalized as proof that someone knows about the truths he d never willingly reveal. As Pelecanos notes in his introduction, the twenty original and unique voices in this collection pay homage to the genre s forebears by taking crime fiction into a thrilling new direction. But make no mistake, he says, we are all standing on the shoulders of writers who came before us and left an indelible mark on literature through craftsmanship, care, and the desire to leave something of worth behind.

Delta Blues

A dollar donation for every book sold will be given to the Rock River Foundation, a charity dedicated to helping the arts and literacy in the Delta. Contributing to the volume are Ace Atkins, Lynne Barrett, James Lee Burke, Suzann Ellingsworth, Beth Ann Fennelly, Bill Fitzhugh, Tom Franklin, John Grisham, Carolyn Haines, Charlaine Harris, Suzanne Hudson, Alice Jackson, Dean James, Toni L.P. Kelner, Michael Lister, Daniel Martine, Mary Saums, David Sheffield, Nathan Singer, and Les Standiford. From the introduction by Morgan Freeman: This collection of short fiction captures both the art of the tale and the power of the blues, and is a nod at the human condition that often inspires musicians to write and sing the blues. These stories tell about bad men and bad women who sometimes do good or sometimes follow their true nature. Some of these characters know all about the dangers of making a bargain with the devil. And some know the power of redemption. These are characters who would not be out of place in a Honeyboy Edwards tune, and would be right at home alongside the desolate wail of Clarksdale, Mississippi, native Son House.

The Best American Mystery Stories 2009

Best selling novelist Jeffrey Deaver edits this latest collection of the genre’s finest from the past year. Featuring ‘gritty tales told with panache,’ this is a ‘must read for anybody who cares about crime stories’ Booklist.

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