James Lee Burke

Beloved Burke hero Detective Dave Robicheaux returns to New Iberia to solve a series of grisly murders.

In Rain Gods, eager to escape his problematic past, Hackberry Holland acquires the sheriff's position in a rundown Texas border town. When authorities discover nine dead prostitutes buried in the desert, Hack must work with both Texas and Mexico, as well as face down hired gunmen, crooked strip club owners, and dubious drug lords, to solve the case. In Cimmaron Rose, Texas attorney and former Texas Ranger Billy Bob Holland has many secrets in his...

The American West in the early 1960s. Aspiring novelist Aaron Holland Broussard finds work on a farm and meets Joanne McDuffy, an articulate and fierce college student and gifted painter. Their soul connection is immediate, but their romance is complicated by Joanne's involvement with a shady professor who is mixed up with a drug-addled cult. When a sinister businessman and his son who wield their influence through vicious cruelty set their sights...

On its surface, life in Houston is as you would expect: drive-in restaurants, souped-up cars, jukeboxes, teenagers discovering their sexuality. But beneath the glitz and superficial normalcy, a class war has begun, and it is nothing like the conventional portrayal of the decade. Against this backdrop Aaron Holland Broussard discovers the poignancy of first love and a world of violence he did not know existed. When Aaron spots the beautiful and gifted...

Detective Dave Robicheaux's world isn't filled with too many happy stories, but Desmond Cormier's rags-to-riches tale is certainly one of them. Robicheaux first met Cormier on the streets of New Orleans, when the young, undersized boy had foolish dreams of becoming a Hollywood director. Twenty-five years later, when Robicheaux knocks on Cormier's door, it isn't to congratulate him on his Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations. Robicheaux has discovered...

The Shondell and Balangie families are enemies in New Iberia's criminal underworld, but teen musicians Johnny Shondell and Isolde Balangie have fallen in love and run away. As Dave Robicheaux investigates the couple's whereabouts, he runs afoul of Isolde's mafioso father, who puts a hit on Robicheaux and his partner, Clete Purcel. The assassin is unlike any they have ever faced: he can induce hallucinations and travels on a ghost ship that materializes...

When last seen in The Glass Rainbow, Dave Robicheaux was recovering in a New Orleans hospital from a near-fatal bullet wound. Immobilized and heavily medicated by morphine, he was visited there by a beautiful Creole woman named Tee Jolie Melton. After she's gone, his fond, hazy remembrances of her are rekindled by one song on the iPod that she kindly left behind. Now obsessed by the song and thoughts of her, he goes in search of his Creole belle,...