Purple Cane Road
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4.5 • 278 Ratings
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
HAfter the relatively lightweight Sunset Limited (1998), Cajun cop Dave Robicheaux returns in a powerhouse of a thriller that shows Burke writing near the peak of his form. Robicheaux faces his most personal case yet, when a pimp puts him on the trail of the truth behind his mother's long-ago disappearance. Meanwhile, he uncovers new evidence in the case of death-row inmate Letty Labiche, who took a mattock to the man who molested her as a child, state executioner Vachel Carmouche. Burke parades the usual cast of grotesques: feckless Louisiana governor Belmont Pugh; cold-blooded attorney general Connie Deshotel; sleazy police liaison officer Jim Gable, who "keeps the head of a Vietnamese soldier in a jar of chemicals"; and psychopathic hit man Johnny Remata, who acts as all-around avenging angel. Wife Bootsie's having had a fling with Gable drives Robicheaux into a jealous fury more than once, while daughter Alafair's flirtation with Johnny raises the temperature even higher. Old buddy Clete Purcell doesn't have a lot to do, other than to contribute to the general mayhem. Once Robicheaux learns that his mother fell afoul of a couple of New Orleans cops in the pay of the Giacano crime family, it's a simple matter of identifying the guilty pair and bringing them to justiceDor is it? Burke winds up an often convoluted and gratuitously violent plot with a dynamite ending that will leave readers feeling truly satisfied, if a bit shell-shocked. Major ad/promo; author tour.
Customer Reviews
Good read
Author is able to paint a visual picture of locations in book. I found it mildly confusing at times. The end was somewhat predictable.
Another Great One
I love all the Dave Robicheaux novels and really anything that James Lee Burke writes. He’s got such a way with words.
Excellent read
Absolutely one of the best written mysteries I have read. His writing style is a joy and just makes the reader reflect on life and the natural world.