Deitrich is the local boy made good, rich but dirty, and doesn't care who he hurts on his way to the top. It's up to Billy Bob to tie down Deitrich and his henchmen - including the local sheriff, who cannot afford to be impartial, not if he wants to keep his job. The crime book of the year is unquestionably James Lee Burke's Heartwood. 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 mythical final paragraphs. An irresistible combination of western feuding and southern lyricism, it makes most other American crime fiction look drab and unambitious' Sunday Times 'The best crime fiction ends up transcending and sometimes transforming its genre.
Heartwood comes very close to doing that.
As always, Burke writes beautifully, playing on the reader's responses with the skill of the virtuoso he is. In Cimarron Rose, James Lee Burke introduced a new character, Texts attorney Billy Bob Holland. His second appearance in Heartwood is carved from the same sturdy fictional wood, and once again pits starkly etched characters against ghosts from the past, their own fallibility and deep layers of guilt and crime - all against a verdant landscape of rolling hills and rivers which no other writer portrays with such evocative realism. Sunset Limited America's finest crime writer returns to Louisiana with his great creation, Detective Dave Robicheaux. When Dave Robicheaux discovers that Megan Flynn and her brother Cisco are back in town, his well-honed instinct for trouble is aroused.