Sunset Limited

Detective Dave Robicheaux re-turns 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. "Not since Raymond Chandler has anyone so thoroughly reinvented the crime and mystery genre," said novelist Jim Harrison, and in Sunset Limited Burke continues to carve out new territory.

As always in the fiction of James Lee Burke, the past impinges on the present: The forty-year-old crucifixion of a prominent labor leader named Jack Flynn remains an unsolved atrocity that has never been forgotten in New Iberia, Louisiana. When Flynn's daughter, Megan, a photojournalist drawn to controversial subjects, returns to the site of her father's murder, it quickly becomes clear that her family's bloodstained past will not stay buried.

Megan gives her old friend Dave Robicheaux a tip about a small-time criminal named Cool Breeze Broussard, scarcely suspecting that the seemingly innocuous case will lead Robicheaux and his partner, Helen Soileau, into the midst of a deadly conspiracy. As New Orleans mobsters and mysterious hit men converge on his parish, Robicheaux soon finds that all the clues point back in time to the tortured death of Jack Flynn.

Combining brilliant prose, crackling suspense, and an exquisite sense of character and place, Sunset Limited is a wrenching tale of historic violence and soiled redemption that reveals one of America's finest novelists at his masterful best.