Purple Cane Road

"Purple Cane Road" is James Lee Burke's finest Dave Robicheaux novel yet, combining a brilliant and compelling plot with the pure writing genius that has earned him the reputation as "the best suspense novelist writing today" (Rocky Mountain News). Dave Robicheaux has spent his life confronting the age-old adage that the sins of the father pass on to the son. But what of his mother and her legacy? Since his youth, Dave has relegated the missing Mae Guillory to the deepest recesses of memory, resigned to the fact that he would never know what happened to the woman who abandoned him to the devices of his whiskey-ridden father. But deep down, he still mourns the loss of his mother and fears that the infinite series of disappointments in her life have come to no 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 thirty 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 forces him to re-examine his past...and to discover what it means to be his mother's son. "Purple Cane Road" has all the hallmarks of a classic -- passion, murder, and nearly heartbreaking poignancy -- wrapped in a wonderfully executed plot that surprises from start to finish.