James Lee Burke

Texas lawyer Billy Bob Holland is in Montana visiting an old friend when he is pulled into an investigation of a string of murders. At first, he seeks to protect his friend. But as the body count rises, Billy Bob begins to see evidence of a grisly vendetta..

Lucas Smothers, nineteen and from the wrong end of town, has been arrested for the rape and murder of a local girl. His lawyer, former Texas Ranger Billy Bob Holland, is convinced of Lucas's innocence, but proving it means unearthing the truth from the seething mass of deceit and corruption that spreads like wildfire in a gossipy small town where everybody knows everybody else's business. Billy Bob's relationship with Lucas's family is not an easy one. Years back he was a close friend of Mrs. Smother, too close, according to her husband. But when Lucas overhears gruesome tales of serial murder from a neighboring cell in the local lock-up, he himself looks like a candidate for an untimely death, and Billy Bob incurs enemies far more dangerous than any he faced as a Ranger.

A collection of stories set in and around the American Deep South. From New Orleans to Dallas, with excursions further afield in Korea and Vietnam, the charismatic characters live out lives of laughter and tragedy, mystery and intrigue, bringing vividly to life the heat and dust of Southern life.

When a Nazi submarine is discovered off the Louisiana coast some troubled ghosts are ready to be released. A local businessman is offering Detective Dave Robicheaux big money to bring the wreck to the surface, but he is not the only one after the submarine and its mysterious cargo...

After a violent encounter that leaves four Mexican soldiers dead, Texas Ranger Hackberry Holland escapes the country in possession of a stolen artifact. This earns him the ire of a bloodthirsty Austrian arms dealer who places Hack's son Ishmael squarely in the cross hairs of a plot to recapture his prize, believed to be the mythic cup of Christ. From Mexico to the Battle of the Marne in 1918, and on to the bordellos and saloons of San Antonio, House of the Rising Sun is an epic tale of love, loss, betrayal, vengeance, and retribution that follows Texas Ranger Hackberry Holland on his journey to reunite with his estranged son.

Wyatt Dixon, rodeo cowboy, is certainly not one of Billy Bob Holland's favourite people. Sentenced to sixty years in jail for murder, Dixon is out after only a year, due to the DA's failure to disclose a piece of information. He swears he's a changed man and needs Billy Bob's help, but how can Billy Bob believe the man who tortured his wife? And then there's Johnny American Horse, who has been caught carrying a gun. He says he needs it for protection; in a dream he saw two men coming for him and it isn't long before his prediction proves him right . . .

On its surface, life in Houston is as you would expect. But beneath the glitz and superficial normalcy, a class war has begun, and it is nothing like the conventional portrayal of the decade. Against this backdrop Aaron Holland Broussard spots the beautiful and gifted Valerie Epstein fighting with her boyfriend, Grady Harrelson, at a Galveston drive-in and inadvertently challenges the power of the Mob and one of the richest families in Texas.

Homicide detective Dave Robicheaux has been warned that he's on somebody's hit list, and now he is trying to discover just who that is before he ends up dead. Meanwhile he has taken on the murder investigation of a young girl found dead in the Bayou swamp. Robicheaux uncovers a web of corruption that leads him to a terrifying confrontation with the one horror he fears most of all.

For generations, Perry James' family, staunch unionists, has lived under the shadow of the Cumberland range and worked in the coal mines. To escape from the cycle of poverty, Perry signs up with the Jobs Corps, where they begin to teach him a skilled trade and how to read and write. But Perry is torn between family honour and the lure of seedy beer joints where he can drink and escape…