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the beauty of Burke's writing is the carefully crafted gorgeous run on sentences (amazing in their delicacy of word choices) contrasted with the violence that spurts from his finely developed characters.

Purple Cane Road is the 17th (?) of his novels and almost perfect. (More on "almost" in a second). He brings to bear familiar characters (Bootsie, Batist, Alafair, Cletus Purcell, the Sherriff), but ties it to a core value of Burke's: family. Robicheaux, in the course of a typically brutal "investigation" by Clete, his best friend, hears that his mother was murdered by detectives from the New Orleans Police Department and that she was a hooker. While Robicheaux realizes that his mother was not a queen, he is shaken. A whore? Murdered? Murdered by the NOPD?

Luckily Robicheaux is still on the wagon or we would see him swirl into drink, despair... His AA outlook saves him.

Okay, I was disappointed in the lack of exploration of some of the characters. They are introduced but not fully explored -- if I had not read previous Robicheaux novels, they would have seemed hurried in their introduction.

On a scale of 1 to 10, the styling of the book gets a 9.5 -- the prose, the evocation of the scenes, the way i could practically smell the sea air/salt...

On a scale of 1 to 10, the action is a 10. Brutal, but realistic.

One item surprised me: Dave rarely talks about the daily life of being a police officer. In this novel, we get a few paragraphs on how difficult (the things you see, the people you interact with, the smell of it...) it can be to be a cop.

Whenever I finish a James Lee Burke novel or watch NYPD Blue, I think, Man, I wish I could craft something as clear, true and compelling as this.

While travelling through Missoula, MT this summer, I almost looked up James Lee Burke in the phone book, to call and say, "Thanks for creating such a robust, honest, tough character." But then I thought, heck, if he's like Robicheaux, he doesn't need my interruption. He wrote the book because he had demons to exercise and wanted to help people -- his written civil duty.

Buy it tonight. Don't plan on sleeping much.

All the characters you have come to look forward to reading about are back again. There's Dave, Clete Purcell, Bootsie, Helen Soileau, Alafair and Batist. Even Tripod, Alafair's three legged pet racoon is still in the cast.

What Burke does exceptionally well with this novel is introduce more interesting characters to the mix. The story also deals with obsession(s) as Dave tries to clear a woman on Death Row while finding out who killed his mother more than 30 years before.

The violence that punctuates all of the novels in this series is also present here as well. Most noticeably, Clete Purcell, Dave's loyal former partner and always best-friend, seems to find more than his fair share of it. His excessive drinking and intemperate remarks and lifestyle continue in PURPLE CANE ROAD and it is during the moments when we read of these events that JLB interjects much of his pathos and humor. Clete is an extremely violent man, but it is also good to know that he is primarily on the side of right. God help the people of Louisiana if he were ever to cross over to the criminal side of the spectrum.

Dave Robicheaux is obssessed by the need to find out who killed his mother Mae in 1967. Readers of this series will remember that Dave's mother abandoned him for a bouree dealer when she left while Dave was still a small boy. As a grown man and a police officer, Dave struggles to do right by her memory by re-opening the unsolved 30 year old case. Along the way, he runs into the string of sociopaths that Burke is so fond of populating this series with.

All is not right in New Iberia Parish or in New Orleans, either. Cops and politicians are dirty and corrupt and James Lee Burke fully fleshes out the parasites who feed off power, money and the misfortune of others. This is a well-crafted and believeable novel, right through to the very end. When Burke leads the reader to the end of his story, there is a certain type of closure that Dave and the reader both receive. When the reader stops to consider the final outcome of the plot line, he/she will also realize that there is a certain balance to the scales of justice after all.

This was a fast read and the story gripped me right from the beginning. Unlike some of Burke's other books in this series, which start out slowly and speed up, this one asks the reader to climb aboard while the train is traveling down the track at 100 mph. When I finish these books, I wonder when Burke will bring us his next installment. This one left me thirsty for more on the detective and his cohorts in New Iberia, LA.

After reading PURPLE CANE ROAD, you'll never have to ask why James Lee Burke is one of only two authors to win the EDGAR AWARD twice. This man is a master of his craft and this book just proves it.

Paul Connors

Dave's mother was a "whore", who was killed in the sixties, and according to Zipper, she was killed by police officers.

Dave begins his own investigation into his mother's death, while still trying to find evidence that can spare Letty's life, but with witnesses on BOTH cases being killed, he realizes these two cases may be impossible, and at the same time he must go head to head with a killer who will stop at nothing to keep the truth buried.

This is the best entry yet, in the masterful Dave Robicheaux series. "Purple Cane Road" is well-written, and suspenseful throughout, it is peopled with colorful, and exciting characters, and maintains a sense of realism until the end.

James Lee Burke writes the kind of novels readers can get lost in, every sentence flows, while the plot boils to it's stunning conclusion.

A MUST read!

Nick Gonnella