Purple Cane Road
   James Lee Burke
  2000 Doubleday, NY USA
   ISBN: 0385488440


Dave Robicheaux has spent his life confronting the age-old adage that the sins of the father pass on to the son. Why is Dave wondering what legacy his mother has left him & why would a pimp remember a 30 year old murder? How is the execution of Letty Labiche connected to Dave's mother?

It has come to my attention that for some strange reason my reading of James Lee Burke's books has escaped my reviewer's view. Webmaster & I always eagerly grab Author Burke's latest off the library shelf & hurry home to return to Dave Robicheaux's world of swamps & sunsets, boogie players & lowlifes, an ordinary man with an extraordinary sense of honor & compassion with a recovering wife he adores, a teenage daughter who is on the verge of rebellion & a home his father built with his bare hands.

Purple Cane Road takes us back to New Iberia Parish with Dave's memories of Vachel Carmouche, an electrician or to give him his real moniker - the local executioner. He seemed to bother no one or harm anyone other than those tortured souls sentenced to his electric chair. Carmouche was a solitary man, often baby-sitting the children of the neighborhood. Now, Dave discovers that Carmouche was not the harmless eccentric everyone thought. Now, twin sisters, Letty & Passion Labiche, are in trouble for carving up Carmouche like a slaughtered hog & one is due to die by lethal injection.

Dave Robicheaux is a Vietnam Veteran & a New Iberia Parish police detective who has only recently dragged himself out of the bottle. When he gets a call to check out an isolated house he finds his long time friend Clete Purcel throwing lowlifes off the roof into an ancient oak tree. While Dave attempts to sort out the fracas, Zipper Clum, a well-known pimp, squints at him & utters a horrifying statement that sends Dave into a swamp of pain & into the past of New Orleans Police Department, a hive of corruption no one wants to disturb.

Dave follows the pimp's clues to Purple Cane Road where his mother, Mae Robicheaux (née Guillory) was murdered. Dave only vaguely remembers his mother who went away, when he was a boy, with a bourree dealer. Life with his father, the huge, whisky-swilling, saloon-brawling, oil rigger Aldous Robicheaux limped along until Aldous died in a fire out in the Gulf.

Dave's search for his mother's killers takes him to the darkest places in his past & solving this case teaches him what it means to be his mother's son. Purple Cane Road is a classic - passion, murder & heart-clenching poignancy - wrapped in a panting plot that surprises from start to finish.

A James Lee Burke book is always a maze of stories where past & present melt into each other & where the Louisiana land comes alive with colors, sounds, scents & seasons & is as much a player in the story as are the people.

James Lee Burke is one of the only two writers ever to win two Edgar Awards & here is a full list of his boogies: Heartwood; Sunset Limited; Cimarron Rose; Burning Angel; Dixie City Jam; In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead; A Stained White Radiance; A Morning for Flamingos; Black Cherry Blues; Heaven's Prisoners; The Neon Rain; The Lost Get-Back Boogie; The Convict; Two for Texas; Lay Down My Sword and Shield; To the Bright and Shining Sun & Half of Paradise.
(04/29/01)

Rebecca