Harbor Lights
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3.6 • 19 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A dynamic, gripping collection of short stories from “America’s best novelist” (Denver Post), the New York Times bestselling James Lee Burke
Harbor Lights is a story collection from one of the most popular and widely acclaimed icons of American fiction, featuring a never-before-published novella. These eight stories move from the marshlands on the Gulf of Mexico to the sweeping plains of Colorado to prisons, saloons, and trailer parks across the South, weaving together love, friendship, violence, survival, and revenge.
As an atmosphere of suspicion pervades their Louisiana town, a boy and his father watch a German submarine sink an oil tanker. A girl is beaten up outside a bar as her university-professor father navigates new love and threats from a group of neo-Nazis. A pair of undercover union organizers are hired to break colts for a Hollywood actor, whose “Western hero” façade hides darkness. An oil rig worker witnesses a horrific attack on a local village while on a job in South America and seeks justice through one final act of bravery.
With his nuanced characters, complex prose, and ability to write shocking violence in the most evocative settings, James Lee Burke’s singular skills are on display in this superb anthology. Harbor Lights unfolds in stories that crackle and reverberate as unexpected heroes emerge.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Burke (Every Cloak Rolled in Blood), best-known for his Edgar-winning Dave Robicheaux mystery series, proves his versatility as a storyteller in this textured collection. The title story revolves around James Broussard, a middle-aged oil and gas engineer in 1942 Louisiana who remains traumatized by his combat duty in WWI France. When Broussard and his young son, Aaron, witness a capsized tanker burning in the Gulf of Mexico, he reports the calamity anonymously without explaining why to Aaron. Later, at a restaurant, two federal agents attempt to intimidate Broussard into keeping silent about the tanker. Instead, he pokes a hornet's nest by telling the local newspaper. In "The Assault," a history professor is outraged after police refuse to investigate his daughter's beating at a bar, which happened while she was drunk. He takes matters into his own hands, and ends up facing a difficult moral choice. Throughout, Burke manages to conjure his characters' worldview in a few artful brushstrokes (Aaron in the title story dreams about "harbor lights that offer sanctuary from a world that breaks everything in us that is beautiful and good"). These impressive stories establish that Burke doesn't need a whodunit plot to catch a reader's attention.
Customer Reviews
I thought I was reading four different books
 Sadly, this is the worst work I’ve ever read from James Lee Burke. I thought I was reading 4 different books he kept jumping around. It was hard to maintain a storyline. Everything was doom and gloom and dark. I know JAMES has a great skill, but this is a huge disappointment.