The Lost Get Back Boogie

Recently paroled from prison, Ivy Paret settles in with fellow ex-convict Buddy Riordan and Riordan's family on sprawling ranch in Montana and becomes drawn into a tragic conflict involving the family and their neighbors

Before The Lost Get-Back Boogie appeared to wide acclaim in 1986, James Lee Burke had been out of print in cloth for thirteen years and his fifth novel had received a record 111 rejection letters. "LSU Press put me back in the game and turned my career around," Burke says. The novels and stories Burke had written during those years of rejection eventually became the stuff of the Dave Robicheaux series, which has earned him two Edgar Awards.Reviews of The Lost Get-Back Boogie now seem prescient. "This is the book that Burke was born to write—and you're grateful he did," wrote syndicated reviewer Nancy Pate. "It's the sort of novel that could win Burke a wider readership," said the Wichita Eagle-Beacon. And from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "The Lost Get-Back Boogie was my introduction to Burke, and it is a cherished one. Burke demonstrates a rare ability to write an extraordinarily propulsive tale that borders on genre fiction without ever being less than literature." The novel's title is also the name of the song that Iry Paret—a honky-tonk musician, Korean vet, and ex-con—wants to write to hold his memories of a "more uncomplicated time," before the war, before prison. The book opens the day thirty-year-old Iry leaves Louisiana's Angola state penitentiary, after serving two years for manslaughter, and follows him to Montana, where he hopes to stay cool and out of trouble by working hard on a ranch owned by the father of his prison pal, Buddy Riordan. Iry finds the fresh start he seeks, joins a weekend band, and even falls in love. But the Riordan family's problems deal Iry a new sort of trouble with some ultimately tragic consequences. The Lost Get-Back Boogie is a novel about loyalty and friendship, betrayal and loss. It is about essentially good people and their attempts to define the value of their lives and to find their place in a changing, complicated world. And it is the work of James Lee Burke at the top of his form.

This first novel by "New York Times" bestselling author Burke--a long-out-of-print Pulitzer Prize winner---tells the story of a Korean war veteran and ex-con who tries to put the past behind him, even as he becomes embroiled in a heated political fight. Now available in this Premium Edition.

As Frank Riordan wages a one man campaign to shut down the local pulp mill that is polluting the air and devastating the environment, tensions are growing and so is the level of power he's up against. It is becoming more than he can handle and the man who can help already has troubles of his own.

James Lee Burke’s most beloved character, Dave Robicheaux, returns in this New York Times bestselling mystery set in the towns and backwoods of Louisiana: an “enthralling yet grim novel that…will captivate, start to finish” (Publishers Weekly). Dave Robicheaux is a haunted man. From the acts he committed in Vietnam, to his battles with alcoholism, to the sudden loss of his beloved wife, Molly, his thoughts drift from one irreconcilable memory to the next. Images of ghosts pepper his reality. Robicheaux’s only beacon remains serving as a detective in New Iberia, Louisiana. It’s in that capacity that Robicheaux crosses paths with powerful mob boss, Tony Nemo. Tony has a Civil War sword he’d like to give to Levon Broussard, a popular local author whose books have been adapted into major Hollywood films. Then there’s Jimmy Nightengale, the young poster boy of New Orleans wealth and glamour. Jimmy’s fond of Levon’s work, and even fonder of his beautiful, enigmatic wife, Rowena. Tony thinks Jimmy can be a US Senator someday, and has the resources and clout to make it happen. There’s something off about the relationship among these three men, and after a vicious assault, it’s up to Robicheaux to uncover the truth “in the barn-burner of a climax” (Booklist, starred review). Complicating matters is the sudden death of the New Iberian local responsible for Molly’s death; namely that Robicheaux’s colleague thinks Robicheaux had something to do with it. As Robicheaux works to clear his name and make sense of the murder, a harrowing study of America emerges: this nation’s abiding conflict between a sense of past grandeur and a legacy of shame, its easy seduction by demagogues and wealth, and its predilection for violence and revenge. “It has been almost five years since James Lee Burke’s last Dave Robicheaux novel, and it was absolutely worth the wait” (Associated Press).

This early novel from bestselling author James Lee Burke is a gritty coming-of-age story about a young Kentucky miner growing up in the Appalachian mountains who’s torn between his family life and the lure of the city. James Lee Burke, a writer who “can touch you in ways few writers can” (The Washington Post) brings his brilliant feel for time and place to this stunning story of Appalachia in the early 1960s. Here, Perry Woodson Hatfield James, a young man torn between family honor and the lure of seedy watering holes, must somehow survive the tempestuous journey from boyhood to manhood and escape the dark and atavistic heritage of the Cumberland Mountains.

Four American mystery writers have contributed new dimensions to the mystery form. Tony Hillerman's Navajos and their customs, Amanda Cross's (Carolyn Heilbrun's) academics and their feminist credentials (or lack thereof), James Lee Burke's Southern Louisiana Cajuns and his own fiercely moral take on Southern gothic fiction, and Walter Mosley's urban blacks and their culture have challenged the conventional mystery's focus. Using feminist and black critical theory, mythic and historical patterns, and literary genre theory, Samuel Coale examines these writers' works and investigates the compromises that each is forced to make when working within a recognizably popular literary form.

Returning to his Louisiana hometown to investigate a murder, detective Dave Robicheaux finds his skills pushed to their limits when his best friend is accused and his daughter becomes involved in shady business dealings.

For years, critics have acclaimed the power of James Lee Burke's writing, the luminosity of his prose, the psychological complexity of his characters, the richness of his landscapes. Over the course of twenty novels and one collection of short stories, he has developed a loyal and dedicated following among both critics and general readers. His thrillers, featuring either Louisiana cop Dave Robicheaux or Billy Bob Holland, a hardened Texas-based lawyer, have consistently appeared on national bestseller lists, making Burke one of America's most celebrated authors of crime fiction. Now, in a startling and brilliantly successful departure, Burke has written a historical novel -- an epic story of love, hate, and survival set against the tumultuous background of the Civil War and Reconstruction. At the center of the novel are James Lee Burke's own ancestors, Robert Perry, who comes from a slave-owning family of wealth and privilege, and Willie Burke, born of Irish immigrants, a poor boy who is as irreverent as he is brave and decent. Despite their personal and political conflicts with the issues of the time, both men join the Confederate Army, choosing to face ordeal by fire, yet determined not to back down in their commitment to their moral beliefs, to their friends, and to the abolitionist woman with whom both have become infatuated. One of the most compelling characters in the story, and the catalyst for much of its drama, is Flower Jamison, a beautiful young black slave befriended, at great risk to himself, by Willie and owned by -- and fathered by, although he will not admit it -- Ira Jamison. Owner of Angola Plantation, Ira Jamison is a true son of the Old South and also a ruthless businessman, who, after the war, returns to the plantation and re-energizes it by transforming it into a penal colony, which houses prisoners he rents out as laborers to replace the slaves who have been emancipated. Against all local law and customs, Flower learns from Willie to read and write, and receives the help and protection of Abigail Dowling, a Massachusetts abolitionist who had come south several years prior to help fight yellow fever and never left, and who has attracted the eye of both Willie and Robert Perry. These love affairs are not only fraught with danger, but compromised by the great and grim events of the Civil War and its aftermath. As in all of Burke's writings, White Doves at Morning is full of wonderful, colorful, unforgettable villains. Some, like Clay Hatcher, are pure "white trash" (considered the lowest of the low, they were despised by the white ruling class and feared by former slaves). From their ranks came the most notorious of the vigilante groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia. Most villainous of all, though, are the petty and mean-minded Todd McCain, owner of New Iberia's hardware store, and the diabolically evil Rufus Atkins, former overseer of Angola Plantation and the man Jamison has placed in charge of his convict labor crews. Rounding out this unforgettable cast of characters are Carrie LaRose, madam of New Iberia's house of ill repute, and her ship's-captain brother Jean-Jacques LaRose, Cajuns who assist Flower and Abigail in their struggle to help the blacks of the town. With battle scenes at Shiloh and in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia that no reader will ever forget, and set in a time of upheaval that affected all men and all women at all levels of society, White Doves at Morning is an epic worthy of America's most tragic conflict, as well as a book of substance, importance, and genuine originality, one that will undoubtedly come to be regarded as a masterpiece of historical fiction.

"'Imelda Sheridan was dead, which was tough cookies on Imelda, but then every silver lining has its cloud. My job was to find out who and why, at 12 cent per word for the right facts in the right order...which is how it all started out, anyway.'" Harry Rigby likes a smoke, the easy life, and Robert Ryan playing the bad guy in late night black-and-whites. Sweet. But when the wife of a prominent politician is murdered in her best nightie, Rigby finds himself caught in a crossfire between rogue paramilitaries, an internal Garda inquiry and the heaviest blizzard of coke ever to hit the northwest. If all this wasn't bad enough, his relationship with girlfriend Denise is on the rocks and he's hitting the bottle. Then there's Rigby's psychotic brother Gonzo, back on the streets and meaner than a jilted shark.