Purple Cane Road by James Lee Burke

You know, these are very violent stories.  Dave and Cletus - while I love these characters - I would not want to hang with them.  People are always getting hurt.  God forbid you are morally questionable.  Chances are you may not survive the novel.  I'm just trying to come up with a body count for this book - without any spoilers:  seven - no eight.  Two I can share without ruining anything - Dave's mom - Oooo - nine.

Like other Burke stories he writes beautiful descriptions of characters that capture their essence and their mood, foreshadowing particularly within dream.  Bad guys are inherently evil - but good guys can do and do do really bad things.  Refer again to that body count.

wait - Ten.

I'm not sure what someone reading this blog post is expecting.  A synopsis that is somehow different from the book jacket?  Don't know that I can do that beyond what you've just read.  Dave learns that bad cops murdered his mother in the 1960s.  One Pimp with a great name: Zipper Clum.  One smart, at times honorable though ultimately psychopathic "button man".  A slew of dishonorable cops.  Twin survivors of child sexual abuse - one of whom is on death row for the murder of their assailant.  A former movie star with her geek chauffeur.  A couple of prostitutes.  A former preacher - now governor - who is caught between his conscience and ambition.  Dave, Clete, Helen, Bootsy, Alafair and the sheriff. With a side of Mae and Aldous Robicheaux.  Without a doubt, I left someone out.

Now for the part I write this to celebrate - language.

This man, to his surprise, is dying.  You can feel it, can't you?

But something was wrong in a way he couldn't focus on, like a dream that should illuminate all the dark corners of your consciousness but in daylight eludes your memory.

Now feel this -  

After he closed the door behind him, his heat and anger remained like a visible presence in the room's silence.

What do you think this woman's future holds?  Note- roses are recurrent in this novel. 

She walked on the duckboards to the end of the bar, her back turned toward me so I couldn't see her face.  Her large body was framed against the white glare of the parking lot, her smoke-colored hair wispy with light.  She picked a rose out of a green bottle on the liquor counter and stared at it dumbly.  The petals were dead, the color of a bruise, and they fell off the stem of their own weight and drifted downward onto the duckboards.

Remember that first guy who is dying?  This one has gone and done it.  What sort of revelation do you think has been revealed to him about his life?

The detective named ***** lay on his side, his head on one arm, his jaws locked open, his eyes looking vacuously into space, as though a terrible revelation about his life had just been whispered in his ear.

Feel the evil dripping??

When he spoke again, his voice was not the same.  It came out of a barrel, dipped in blackness, the youthful face dissolving in the mind's eye.... His words were slow and deliberate, as though her were picking them one by one out of a cardboard box...  There was a click in his throat, then an exhalation of breath like a damp match flaring to life.

This character did not play much of a role - but what a description of her character!

...she seldom smiled and she went about her job with the abrasiveness of a carpenter building coffins with a nail gun.