Purple Cane Road: 11 (Dave Robicheaux) - Softcover

Burke, James Lee

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0440224047 ISBN 13: 9780440224044

Publisher: Dell, 2001

Synopsis

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

About this title

Review

Purple Cane Road is proof positive that James Lee Burke is considerably more than a dispenser of tough and atmospheric detective yarns. His central character, Dave Robicheaux, is more than just a powerful addition to a prestigious series. We are dealing here with a stylist of the first order: a writer who has managed to seamlessly marry the hard-boiled idiom of Chandler with the atmosphere and literary elegance of William Faulkner.

Robicheaux is here plunged into his most painful and personal odyssey yet. He learns that his mother, Mae, was a prostitute who ended up drowned in a mud puddle by crooked cops in the pay of the Mob. As Dave and his partner Clete Purcell investigate, they encounter State Governor Belmont Pugh, a fundamentalist preacher; the terrifying Remeta, a super-intelligent hit man, and, most significantly, Jim Gable, owner of the mansion in Purple Cane Road, who knows more about Dave's wife then Dave himself.

As Robicheaux struggles through a morass of intrigue and double-dealing, he finds that coming to terms with his own troubled past becomes as important as identifying the his mother's killers. Burke's strategy is to subtly subvert the standard detective narrative, creating a seamy panoply of the darker side of American society. Alongside the customary imperatives of bloody violence and dangerous sexuality, Burke is able to address such issues as the growing chasm between black and white and the inequalities that have riven American society. He is a storyteller of prodigious ability and his use of language remains nonpareil:

I returned to New Orleans and my problems with pari-mutuel windows and a dark-haired, milk-skinned wife from Martinique who went home with men from the Garden District while I was passed out in a house boat on Lake Pontchartrain, the downdraft of US Army helicopters flattening a plain of elephant grass in my dreams.

--Barry Forshaw

Review

"America's best novelist."
-- The Denver Post

"A thoroughly absorbing mystery packed with the colorful characters and moral dilemmas that have turned Dave Robicheaux into one of the more vivid literary creations of the last 20 years."
-- Daily News (New York)

"Nobody writes about the bad old days down South like James Lee Burke."
-- The New York Times

"No other living writer has been more influential on the contemporary crime novel than James Lee Burke.... This one is his best."
-- Michael Connelly, author of Void Moon

Don't miss James Lee Burke's sensational bestsellers:

Heartwood

"A heartfelt, passionate book ... powerfully bittersweet."
-- The Seattle Times

Sunset Limited

"Splendidly atmospheric ... with dialogue so sharp you can shave with it."
-- People

Available from Dell

About this edition

• Publisher: Dell
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0440224047
• ISBN 13: 9780440224044
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 400