Heartwood

Deaf Smith, Texas, a small town with small town problems until the local boy made good Earl Deitrich decides that he isn't prepared to share his kind of good fortune with anybody else.

Wilbur Pickett is a retired rodeo rider with big dreams. Dreams of a secure future for himself and his native American wife, a blind woman who sees more than a blind woman should thanks to her ancient heritage. When Wilbur happens upon a parcel of land with black gold waiting for the taking he also happens on Deitrich and a whole bunch of violent problems. Only lawyer Billy Bob Holland is prepared to stand up for Wilbur, to stand against the juggernaut that is Deitrich and his corrupting influence.

“There are not many crime writers about whom one might invoke the name of Zola for comparison, but Burke is very much in that territory. His stamping ground is the Gulf coast, and one of the great strengths of his work has always been the atmospheric background of New Orleans and the bayous. His big, baggy novels are always about much more than the mechanics of the detective plot; his real subject, like the French master, is the human condition, seen in every situation of society.”

James Lee Burke is the heavyweight champ, a great American novelist whose work, taken individually or as a whole, is unsurpassed. Michael Connelly
A gorgeous prose stylist. Stephen King
Richly deserves to be described now as one of the finest crime writers America has ever produced. Daily Mail
Independent
The king of Southern noir. Daily Mirror
His lyrical prose, his deep understanding of what makes people behave as they do, and his control of plot and pace are masterly. Sunday Telegraph
It's testimony to his skills of characterisation and description that he still manages to produce tales of entrancing beauty . . . But it's in the description of places and societies that Burke really comes into his own Guardian
When it comes to literate, pungently characterised American crime writing, James Lee Burke has few peers. Daily Express
Pitches starkly etched characters against ghosts from the past, their own fallibility, and deep layers of guilt and crime - all against the verdant landscape of rolling hills and rivers which no other writer portrays with such evocative realism. Burke is the poet of the tortured South and never fails to connect at all levels TIME OUT
The crime book of the year is unquestionably James Lee Burke's Heartwood . . . This is an extraordinarily powerful story, full of vivid characters, some normal, more grotesque, set against a landscape which is poetically and movingly evoked: there is no better crime writing coming out of America EVENING STANDARD
Burke is a prodigiously accomplished writer, and Heartwood displays to the full his gifts for evoking place, creating a Faulknerian succession of bizarre characters and producing sudden figurative starbursts exemplified by its exhilaratingly mythic final paragraphs. An irresistible combination of western feuding and southern lyricism SUNDAY TIMES
Heartwood should be in every crime lover's Christmas stocking SUNDAY TRIBUNE

James Lee Burke is the author of many previous novels, many featuring Detective Dave Robicheaux. He won the Edgar Award in 1998 for CIMARRON ROSE, while BLACK CHERRY BLUES won the Edgar in 1990 and SUNSET LIMITED was awarded the CWA Gold Dagger in 1998. He lives with his wife, Pearl, in Missoula, Montana and New Iberia, Louisiana.

Deaf Smith, Texas, a small town with small town problems until the local boy made good Earl Deitrich decides that he isn't prepared to share his kind of good fortune with anybody else.Wilbur Pickett is a retired rodeo rider with big dreams. Dreams of a secure future for himself and his native American wife, a blind woman who sees more than a blind woman should thanks to her ancient heritage. When Wilbur happens upon a parcel of land with black gold waiting for the taking he also happens on Deitrich and a whole bunch of violent problems. Only lawyer Billy Bob Holland is prepared to stand up for Wilbur, to stand against the juggernaut that is Deitrich and his corrupting influence.

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