Read more
Zusatztext "America's best novelist." -- The Denver Post "A thoroughly absorbing mystery packed with the colorful characters and moral dilemmas that have turned Dave Robicheaux into one of the more vivid literary creations of the last 20 years." -- Daily News (New York) "Nobody writes about the bad old days down South like James Lee Burke." -- The New York Times "No other living writer has been more influential on the contemporary crime novel than James Lee Burke.... This one is his best." -- Michael Connelly! author of Void Moon Don't miss James Lee Burke's sensational bestsellers: Heartwood "A heartfelt! passionate book ... powerfully bittersweet." -- The Seattle Times Sunset Limited "Splendidly atmospheric ... with dialogue so sharp you can shave with it." -- People Available from Dell Informationen zum Autor James Lee Burke is the author of nineteen books, including the bestsellers Heartwood , Sunset Limited , Cimarron Rose , Cadillac Jukebox , Burning Angel , and Dixie City Jam . He lives with his wife in Missoula, Montana, and New Iberia, Louisiana. Klappentext 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. Leseprobe 1 Years ago, in state documents, Vachel Carmouche was always referred to as the electrician, never as the executioner. That was back in the days when the electric chair was sometimes housed at Angola. At other times it traveled, along with its own generators, on a flatbed semitruck from parish prison to parish prison. Vachel Carmouche did the state's work. He was good at it. In New Iberia we knew his real occupation but pretended we did not. He lived by himself, up Bayou Teche, in a tin-roofed, paintless cypress house that stayed in the deep shade of oak trees. He planted no flowers in his yard and seldom raked it, but he always drove a new car and washed and polished it religiously. Early each morning we'd see him in a cafe on East Main, sitting by himself at the counter, in his pressed gray or khaki clothes and cloth cap, his eyes studying other customers in the mirror, his slight overbite paused above his coffee cup, as though he were waiting to speak, although he rarely engaged others in conversation. When he caught you looking at him, he smiled quickly, his sun-browned face threading with hundreds of lines, but his smile did not go with the expression in his eyes. Vachel Carmouche was a bachelor. If he had lady friends, we were not aware of them. He came infrequently to Provost's Bar and Pool Room and would sit at my table or next to me at the bar, indicating in a vague way that we were both law off...
