James Lee Burke

A routine assignment transporting two death-row prisoners to their executions goes fatally wrong, leaving Dave Robicheaux brutally wounded and his partner dead. Obsessed with revenge, Dave is persuaded by the DEA to go undercover into the torrid sleepy depths of New Orleans, a volatile world of Mafia drug-running and Cajun voodoo magic. He becomes irrevocably snarled in the nightmarish web surrounding Mafia don Tony Cardo and must put himself against his own worst fears in order to survive.

"At the end of Bitterroot, rodeo cowboy Wyatt Dixon - 'the most dangerous, depraved, twisted and unpredicatable human being I ever knew' - was sentences to sixty years in jail for murder. Now, one year later, he's out, due to the DA's failure to disclose a piece of evidence. Among his many crimes, Wyatt once totured Billy Bob's wife when she was a cop. Dixon declares to Billy Bob that he's a reformed character, and he needs his help in a venture to raise rodeo livestock. How can Billy Bob possibly believe him?" "Meanwhile Johnny American Horse, whose worst offences till now have been drunkeness and a belief in his dreams, is caught carrying a gun. He tells Billy Bob he needs it for protection; in a dream he saw two men coming for him. Sure enough, those men Johnny saw are heading Wet, across the Great Plains to Montana, with Johnny as their target. Soon he's in serious trouble with only one man to turn to, Billy Bob - and Billy Bob finds himself pitched into a complex battle that pits him not only against Wyatt Dixon, but against the very government he has sworn to support". -- BOOK JACKET.

"From "America's best novelist" (The Denver Post): A sprawling thriller drenched with atmosphere and intrigue that takes a young boy from a chance encounter with Bonnie and Clyde to the trenches of World War II and the oil fields along the Texas-Louisiana coast. It is 1934 and the Depression is bearing down when sixteen-year-old Weldon Avery Holland happens upon infamous criminals Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow after one of their notorious armed robberies. A confrontation with the outlaws ends as Weldon puts a bullet through the rear window of Clyde's stolen automobile. Ten years later, Second Lieutenant Weldon Holland and his sergeant, Hershel Pine, escape certain death in the Battle of the Bulge and encounter a beautiful young woman named Rosita Lowenstein hiding in a deserted extermination camp. Eventually, Weldon and Rosita fall in love and marry and, with Hershel, return to Texas to seek their fortunes. There, they enter the domain of jackals known as the oil business. They meet Roy Wiseheart--a former Marine aviator haunted with guilt for deserting his squadron leader over the South Pacific--and Roy's wife Clara, a vicious anti-Semite who is determined to make Weldon and Rosita's life a nightmare. It will be the frontier justice upheld by Weldon's grandfather, Texas lawman Hackberry Holland, and the legendary antics of Bonnie and Clyde that shape Weldon's plans for saving his family from the evil forces that lurk in peacetime America and threaten to destroy them all"-- "WAYFARING STRANGER begins in West Texas in 1934. At age sixteen, Weldon Holland encounters Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker traveling with their accomplices after having just pulled off one of their notorious armed robberies. Weldon is smitten by Bonnie, but because of Clyde and Bonnie's duplicity and the disrespect they show his grandfather, Weldon ends up putting a bullet through the rear window of Clyde's stolen automobile. The story then jumps to 1944 and the Ardennes Forest and the Battle of the Bulge, where Second Lieutenant Weldon Holland saves his sergeant, Hershel Pine, from death by suffocation when he is buried alive in his foxhole under the treads of a Waffen SS Tiger tank. Weldon and Hershel survive the executions of the wounded by the SS and escape on a freight train deep into Nazi Germany. There, they stumble into an extermination camp deserted by the SS, and discover among the stacked bodies a young woman named Rosita Lowenstein, who is not only a remarkable woman but a relative of Rosa Luxemburg (known as "Red Rosa," whose mother's name was Lowenstein). Eventually, Weldon will make her his bride, and the three friends will return to Texas to seek their fortunes. But when Weldon, Hershel, and Rosita form a pipeline corporation, they enter the domain of jackals known as the oil business. They meet Roy Wiseheart--one of the wealthiest men in Texas and a former Marine aviator haunted with guilt for deserting his squadron leader over the South Pacific--and Roy's wife Clara, a vicious anti-semite who is determined to make Weldon and Rosita's life a nightmare"--

Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux finds himself entangled with childhood friends with a violent famly history.

Roman policier (suspense) Début des années 1970, Texas. Hack Holland a tout pour lui : étoile montante de la vie politique texane, il n'a qu'à se laisser entraîner de mondanités en mondanités, serrer des mains, récolter de l'argent, à seule charge pour lui de donner une image impeccable. En fait, ancien prisonnier traumatisé de la guerre de Corée, marié à une femme glaciale, il boit trop. Lorsqu'un vieux camarade de l'armée l'appelle depuis la prison où il a échoué, Hack décide de ne pas le laisser tomber. Sans le savoir, il s'apprête à bouleverser son existence, en s'impliquant dans une violente affaire de lutte pour les droits civiques. Et ainsi se heurter à bon nombre de ses "amis"... Troisième ouvrage de James Lee Burke (1971), c'est le premier à mettre en scène un personnage récurrent, même si Hackberry Ilolland ne réapparaîtra que trente-huit ans plus tard.

Iry Paret's done his time -- two years for manslaughter in Louisiana's Angola State Penitentiary. Now the war vet and blues singer is headed to Montana, where he hopes to live clean working on a ranch owned by the father of his prison pal, Buddy Riordan. In prison, Iry tinkered with a song -- "The Lost Get-Back Boogie" -- that never came out quite right. Now, the Riordan family's problems hand him a new kind of trouble, with some tragic consequences. And Iry must get the tune right at last, or pay a fateful price.

Intervening when he sees the beautiful and gifted Valerie Epstein fighting with her boyfriend, Aaron Holland Broussard inadvertently challenges the power of the Mob in his Korean War-era Texas community.