Book 10

Sunset Limited

by James Lee Burke

Published 20 April 1998

America's finest crime writer returns to Louisiana with his Great creation, Detective Dave Robicheaux.

When Dave Robicheaux discovers that Megan Flynn and her brother Cisco are back in town, his well honed instinct for trouble is aroused. Drawn as ever to those whom he feels need protection, he remembers how their father, a known communist, had been killed by the Klan and the perpetrator never brought to justice. Although both children had gone on to achieve success in their careers - Megan's photographs of the casualties of war have graced the covers of Time Magazine, and CISCO is a wealthy film director - Robicheaux perceives that their veneer of surface respectability disguises murky depths.

Then 2 boys are brutally murdered after allegedly raping a black girl, and an eye witness describes 1 of the murderers as Harpo Scraggs, a Government informant at the time if Jack Flynn's murder. Harpo's re-emergence, together with Megan and Cisco, stirs within Robicheaux a deep and irreversible need to resolve the past.

In this complex and deeply compelling novel, James Lee Burke weaves a web of plots and subplots involving characters as rich and as perfectly observed as any in his previous novels. This is a novel about what it truly means to be black or white, to be politically disposable or indispensable. Dense with passion and compassion, Burke's writing simply gets better and better.


Book 11

Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

Published 20 July 2000

When Detective Dave Robicheaux discovers disturbing secrets from his mother's past, he embarks on a journey through a murky world of vice, politics and murder.

Robicheaux has been told that his mother, Mae, was a hooker and ended her life drowned in a mud puddle by two cops working for the Mob. As Robicheux and his partner hunt for the killers, they hook up with a door-to-door salesman turned state governor, a psychotic hit-man, and the owner of the mansion at Purple Cane Road - who knows rather too much about Robicheux's wife . . .


Book 18

The Glass Rainbow

by James Lee Burke

Published 13 July 2010
From New York Times bestselling author James Lee Burke, Detective Dave Robicheaux becomes entangled in a mystery that connects a series of grisly murders with an ex-convict turned bestselling author, a notorious local pimp, and the man currently dating Robicheaux's daughter.

On the trail of a killer responsible for the deaths of seven young women in neighboring Jefferson Davis parish, Detective Dave Robicheaux and his best friend Clete Purcel can't seem to stay away from Herman Stanga, a notorious pimp whose name constantly resurfaces in their investigation, and whom both men despise. When Stanga turns up dead shortly after a fierce beating in front of numerous witnesses at the hands of Clete Purcel, the case takes a nasty turn, and solving the mystery of the Jefferson Davis deaths becomes more important than ever.

Adding to Robicheaux's troubles is the matter of his adopted daughter, Alafair, on hiatus from Stanford Law for a semester and home in New Iberia 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 bayous. In Robicheaux's mind, Abelard's association with a sleazy ex-convict turned bestselling author named Robert Weingart puts him at the center of some very shady business, and Robicheaux fears he's taking Alafair down with him. But at the same time he fears for Alafair's well-being--and possibly her life--she's becoming more distant toward him, convinced his concerns are just the paranoia of an overprotective father. To protect his daughter and clear his best friend's name, Robicheaux will need every ounce of guts, wit, and investigative chops he can muster.

From the creator of "one of America's best mystery series" (Library Journal, starred review), James Lee Burke's The Glass Rainbow is a "superlative" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) bayou thriller.


Robicheaux

by James Lee Burke

Published 2 January 2018
"Dave Robicheaux is a haunted man. From the acts he committed in Vietnam, to his battles with alcoholism, to the sudden loss of his beloved wife, Molly, his thoughts drift from one irreconcilable memory to the next. Images of ghosts pepper his reality. Robicheaux's only beacon remains serving as a detective in New Iberia, Louisiana. It's in that capacity that Robicheaux crosses paths with powerful mob boss, Tony Nemo. Tony has a Civil War sword he'd like to give to Levon Broussard, a popular local author whose books have been adapted into major Hollywood films. The sword's history can be traced back to Broussard's ancestors, and Tony figures it belongs to Levon. But Tony's intentions aren't so pure; he believes the gift will lead to a slice of Broussard's lucrative film adaptations. Then there's Jimmy Nightengale, the young poster boy of New Orleans wealth and glamour. Jimmy's fond of Levon's work, and even fonder of his beautiful, enigmatic wife, Rowena. Tony thinks Jimmy can be a US Senator someday, and has the resources and clout to make it happen. There's something off about the relationship between these three men, and after a vicious assault, it's up to Robicheaux to uncover the truth. Complicating matters is the sudden death of T.J. Dartez, the New Iberian local responsible for Molly's death. Robicheaux's colleague, Spade Labiche, thinks Robicheaux had something to do with it. Robicheaux's determined to clear his name. He's not alone; his daughter, Alafair, along with his old friend, Clete Purcel are right by Robicheaux's side as he searches for the killer, where a shocking discovery awaits."--Amazon.com.

Pegasus Descending

by James Lee Burke

Published 18 July 2006

Dave Robicheaux left his drinking days behind him many years ago, but he still feels guilt over a tragic event he wasn't sober enough to prevent. Dallas Klein, a gambling addict and bar buddy of Dave's when Dave was posted to Miami PD, was killed in an armed robbery he'd been forced to engineer. Two decades later, several incidents in Dave's life in Iberia Parish link to those involved. First he meets Dallas' daughter, Trish, who keeps odd company and is blackballed by the local casinos. Then the supposed suicide of a young girl appears to be connected to the man Dallas owed money to back in the Miami days.

Dave's inability to let things alone gets him involved with two very powerful criminals, both wanting to protect their sons from the trouble they court, and both with the attitude of the privileged and white. When a young black drug dealer gets on the wrong side of the boys, tensions run high and there are more needless deaths - causing Dave to come to blows with the FBI, the DA's office and a thug who has little regard for any life but his own.


Crusader's Cross

by James Lee Burke

Published 12 July 2005

In the summer of 1958, Dave Robicheaux and his half-brother Jimmie are just out of high school. Jimmie and Dave get work with an oil company, laying out rubber cables in the bays and mosquito-infested swamps all along the Louisiana-Texas coastline. They spend their off time at Galveston Island, fishing at night on the jetties, the future kept safely at bay, the past drifting off somewhere behind them.

But on the Fourth of July, change approaches in the form of Ida Durbin, a sweet-faced young woman with a lovely voice and a mandolin. Jimmie falls instantly in love with her. But Ida's not free to love - she's a prostitute, in hock to a brutal man called Kale, who won't let her go. Jimmie agrees to meet Ida at the bus depot, ready for the road to Mexico. But Ida never shows. Dave and Jimmie want to believe she skipped town, but they know, deep down, that Ida Durbin never got to leave.

That was many years ago - before Dave Robicheaux began his long odyssey through bars and drunk tanks and skin joints of every stripe. Before the Philippines and Vietnam. Now, an older, well-worn Dave walks into Baptist Hospital to visit a man called Troy Bordelon, who wants to free himself of a dark secret before he dies. A bully and a sadist, he has a lot to confess to - but he chooses to talk about a young girl, a prostitute who he glimpsed briefly as a kid, bloodied and beaten, tied to a chair in his uncle's house. Dave realises he can't let the past go. Ida's killers are still out there. So he begins his journey into the past - back to the summer of 1958 and a girl called Ida Durbin.


Burning Angel

by James Lee Burke

Published 1 August 1995
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.


A Private Cathedral

by James Lee Burke

Published 11 August 2020

Detective Dave Robicheaux is caught in the crossfire of Louisiana's oldest and bloodiest gangland feud...

From the wreckage of Louisiana's oldest and family rivalry, Detective Dave Robicheaux faces his most sinister enemy yet . . .
Isolde and Johnny - the star-crossed teenage heirs to New Iberia's criminal empires - have run away together, and Robicheaux is tasked with finding them. But when his investigation brings him too close to both Isolde's mother and her father's mistress, the venomous mafioso orders a hit on Robicheaux and his partner, Clete Purcel.

In order to rescue the young lovers, and save hi self, Robicheaux must face a terrifying time-traveling superhuman hitman capable of inflicting horrifying hallucinations on his victims, and overcome the demons that have tormented him his whole life...


The New Iberia Blues

by James Lee Burke

Published 8 January 2019

Detective Dave Robicheaux first met Desmond Cormier on the backstreets of New Orleans. He was a young pretender who dreamt of stardom whilst Robicheaux had his path all figured out.

Now, twenty-five years later, their roles have reversed. When Robicheaux knocks on Cormier's door, he sees a successful Hollywood director.

It seems dreams can come true. But so can nightmares.

A young woman has been crucified, wearing only a small chain on her ankle, and all the evidence points to Cormier. Robicheaux wants to believe his old friend wouldn't be capable of such a crime - but Cormier's silence is deafening.

And he isn't the only ghost from Robicheaux's past which comes back to haunt him...


Cadillac Jukebox

by James Lee Burke

Published 12 December 1931
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.

Dixie City Jam

by James Lee Burke

Published 4 August 1994
A FORGOTTEN NAZI 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.

Jolie Blon's Bounce

by James Lee Burke

Published 1 June 2002

Small-time black hustler Tee Bobby Hulin is partly redeemed, in Robicheaux's eyes, by a rare musical gift. Three men are present when Amanda Boudreau is raped and murdered, and Tee Bobby's prints are found at the crime scene. Dave reckons he's innocent, and Tee Bobby pleads so, then attempts suicide in his holding cell. Why?

Soon after, hooker and junkie Linda Zeroski is beaten to death by a man wearing leather gloves who, with great care and precision, crushes every bone in her face.

Louisiana's murky history casts a long shadow in the work of James Lee Burke, but nowhere longer than here, with the LaSalles family, who settled there before the Louisiana Purchase and built their wealth upon the backs of slave labour. When lawyer Perry LaSalles takes on the defence of Tee Bobby Hulin, Dave knows his motives are fuelled by guilt. For Tee Bobby's grandmother Ladice was seduced by Perry's grandfather, and Amanda Boudreau's death is related to events that happened long before Tee Bobby was born.

In this rich and compelling novel James Lee Burke weaves a web of plots and subplots involving perfectly observed characters. Dense with passion and compassion, Burke's novels get better and better.


Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

Published 23 September 2003

James Lee Burke is in top form in this page-turner steeped in the lush, unsettling atmosphere that his readers have come to expect.

This time, Burke's renowned Louisana cop returns to the Big Easy in a spellbinding tale of conspiracy, passion, and murder. A rainy late-summer night finds Robicheaux in a New Orleans bar, about to confront the man who may have savagely assaulted his friend, Father Jimmie Dolan, a Catholic priest who's always at the centre of controversy. But things in a Burke novel are rarely what they seem, and soon Robicheaux is back in New Iberia, probing a car crash that killed three teenage girls. A grief-crazed father and a maniacal, conflicted assassin are just a few of the characters Robicheaux meets as he is 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 dark corners of the heart, and peopled by familiar characters such as P.I. Clete Purcel and Robicheaux's old flame, the now-married Theodosia LeJeune, LAST CAR TO ELYSIAN FIELDS is vintage Burke - a moody, hard-hitting novel that goes the limit in its provocative blend of human drama and relentless noir suspense.


Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

Published 4 July 2013
Police detective Dave Robicheaux faces off with the most diabolical villain he has ever faced in the twentieth installment of the Dave Robicheaux series. Sadistic serial killer Asa Surette avoids the death penalty for murders he committed while capital punishment was banned. But when Robicheaux's daughter Alafair writes a series of articles implicating Surrette in other murders which could get him death, he decides to escape prison and make her pay. Can Robicheaux save his daughter?

Creole Belle

by James Lee Burke

Published 17 July 2012
CREOLE BELLE begins where the last book in the Dave Robicheaux series, THE GLASS RAINBOW, ended. Dave is in a recovery unit in New Orleans, where a Creole girl named Tee Jolie Melton visits him and leaves him an iPod with the country blues song 'Creole Belle' on it. Then she disappears. Dave becomes obsessed with the song and the memory of Tee Jolie and goes in search of her sister, who later turns up inside a block of ice floating in the Gulf. Meanwhile, there has been an oil well blowout on the Gulf, threatening the cherished environs of the bayous. CREOLE BELLE is James Lee Burke at his very best, with beloved series hero Dave Robicheaux leading the charge against the destruction of both the land and the people he has sworn to protect.

A Morning for Flamingos

by James Lee Burke

Published 1 October 1990

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.


Heaven's Prisoners

by James Lee Burke

Published 1 April 1988
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 Louisiana's bayous. But a plane crash on the Gulf brings a young girl into his life -- and with her comes a netherworld of murder, deception and home-grown crime. Suddenly Robicheaux is confronting Bubba Rocque, a brutal hood he's known since childhood; Rocque's hungry Cajun wife; and a Federal agent with more guts than sense. In a backwater world where a swagger and a gun go further than the law, Robicheaux and those he loves are caught on a tide of violence far bigger than them all...

Black Cherry Blues

by James Lee Burke

Published 1 September 1989
By the author of Neon Rain and Heaven's Prisoners, this is the third novel featuring ex-New Orleans cop Dave Robicheaux.

Swan Peak

by James Lee Burke

Published 1 July 2008

After the devastating events recounted in THE TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN, Dave Robicheaux and his ex-partner in Homicide, Clete Purcel, head for the mountains and trout streams of Montana for some much-needed healing.

But while Montana might seem an unspoilt paradise peopled by men and women from an earlier, more innocent time in American history, Dave and Clete soon find that there are plenty of serpents in the garden too. The deaths of a couple of hikers suggest a perverted serial killer may be at work, while an escaped jailbird and his former tormentor are locked in a savage dance of revenge that is ultimately connected to the fortunes of a wealthy oil family hiding a terrible secret.


The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

Published 17 July 2007

The story begins with the shooting of two would-be looters in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and then follows a motley group of characters - from street thugs to a big-time mob boss, from a junkie priest to a sadistic psychopath - as their stories converge on a cache of stolen diamonds, while the storm turns the Big Easy into a lawless wasteland of apocalyptic proportions.

The nightmarish landscape created by Katrina seems the perfect setting for Burke's almost Biblical visions of good and evil - it is as if he had to wait for this disaster to find the occasion to match his emotionally supercharged prose. You can feel the undercurrents of rage and pain beneath the narrative, making this not only his most personal and deeply felt book for some time, but quite possibly his best novel to date. This is not just a superb crime novel, it is potentially THE fictional chronicle of a disaster whose human dimensions America is still struggling to process.