Dave Robicheaux novels

In Heaven's Prisoners, best-selling author James Lee Burke introduces the gritty, tough and compassionate former police officer Dave Robicheaux in our first novel of this blockbuster series. Burke's muscular and relentless prose brings characters and events to life with the battering energy of a Bayou thunderstorm. Robicheaux, a recovering alcoholic, has retired to bayou country when a small plane full of passengers-and trouble-drops out of the sky...

Dave Robicheaux felt the bone-grinding pain rip through his body as the .45 did its damage. Through the agonizing haze that enveloped him, he heard an almost inhuman laugh-the hideous, victorious cackling of Jimmie Lee Boggs-a sound he would never forget. It had started out as an ordinary prisoner transfer, then turned into a blood bath when the convicted murderer got hold of a gun. Robicheaux could still hear that contemptible laughter, replacing...

Past meets present in the Louisiana swamps. The image of the dead girl's body lingered in detective Dave Robicheaux's mind as he drove home. After seeing the young victim's corpse, the last thing he needed to come across was a drunk driver. But when he saw the Cadillac fishtail across the road, Robicheaux knew the driver was in trouble. What Dave didn't realize, was that by pulling the car over, he was opening his murder case wider than he could ever...

A brutal legacy of cruelty and hate is awakened in the bayou. When Sonny Boy Marsallus returns to New Iberia after fleeing for Central America to avoid the wrath of the powerful Giacana family, his old troubles soon follow. Meanwhile Dave Robicheaux becomes entangled in the affairs of the Fontenot family, descendants of sharecroppers whose matriarch helped raise Dave as a child. They are in danger of losing the land they've lived on for more than...

Detective Dave Robicheaux returns to center stage in an incendiary new novel by James Lee Burke. A gripping tale of racial violence, class warfare, and the sometimes cruel legacy of Southern history, Sunset Limited is a stunning achievement, confirming Burke's place as one of America's premier stylists as well as master storytellers. The forty-year-old crucifixion of a prominent labor leader named Jack Flynn remains an unsolved atrocity that has...

When a beautiful teenage girl is killed, the victim of a particularly savage rape, New Iberia, Louisiana police detective Dave Robicheaux senses from the very start of the investigation that the most likely suspect -- Tee Bobby Hulin -- is not the actual killer. Though a drug addict and general ne'er-do-well, Hulin doesn't fit the profile for this brutal crime. But when another body turns up -- a drugged-out prostitute who is the daughter of a local...

For Dave Robicheaux, life in Louisiana is filled with haunting memories of the past -- images from Vietnam, the violent streets of New Orleans, and his own troubled youth. In Crusader's Cross, a deathbed confession from an old schoolmate resurrects a story of injustice, the murder of a young woman, and a time in Robicheaux's life he has tried to forget. Her name may or may not have been Ida Durbin. It was back in the innocent days of the 1950s when...

In the waning days of summer, 2005, a storm with greater impact than the bomb that struck Hiroshima peels the face off southern Louisiana. This is the gruesome reality Iberia Parish Sheriff's Detective Dave Robicheaux discovers as he is deployed to New Orleans. As James Lee Burke's new novel, The Tin Roof Blowdown, begins, Hurricane Katrina has left the commercial district and residential neighborhoods awash with looters and predators of every stripe....

Beloved Burke hero Detective Dave Robicheaux returns to New Iberia, Louisiana, to solve a series of grisly murders. Seven young women in neighboring Jefferson Davis Parish have been brutally murdered. While the crimes have all the telltale signs of a serial killer, one death doesn't fit. Adding to Robicheaux's troubles is the matter of his daughter, Alafair, on leave from Stanford Law to put the finishing touches on her novel. Her literary pursuit...

Police detective Dave Robicheaux faces off with the most diabolical villain he has ever faced in the twentieth installment of the Dave Robicheaux series. A summer getaway in Montana for Dave Robicheaux's family and friends is violently shattered by the arrival of serial killer and prison escapee Asa Surrette. He avoids the death penalty for murders he committed while capital punishment was banned in his home state of Kansas. But when Robicheaux's...

"The shocking death of a young woman leads Detective Dave Robicheaux into the dark corners of Hollywood, the mafia, and the backwoods of Louisiana in this gripping mystery from "modern master" (Publishers Weekly) James Lee Burke. Detective Dave Robicheaux's world isn't filled with too many happy stories, but Desmond Cormier's rags-to-riches tale is certainly one of them. Robicheaux first met Cormier on the streets of New Orleans, when the young, undersized...

"James Lee Burke returns to his bestselling Dave Robicheaux series, bringing Dave's partner and friend Clete Purcel to the forefront for the first time as Clete and Dave attempt to stop the ruthless smugglers of a dangerous new drug. Clete Purcel-private investigator, former cop, and war veteran with a hard shell covering just a few soft spots-is Dave Robicheaux's longtime friend and partner in detective work. But he has a troubled past. When Clete...