The beauty of Burke's writing is the carefully crafted gorgeous run on sentences (amazing in their delicacy of word choices) contrasted with the violence that spurts from his finely developed characters.

Purple Cane Road is the 17th (?) of his novels and almost perfect. (More on "almost" in a second). He brings to bear familiar characters (Bootsie, Batist, Alafair, Cletus Purcell, the Sherriff), but ties it to a core value of Burke's: family. Robicheaux, in the course of a typically brutal "investigation" by Clete, his best friend, hears that his mother was murdered by detectives from the New Orleans Police Department and that she was a hooker. While Robicheaux realizes that his mother was not a queen, he is shaken. A whore? Murdered? Murdered by the NOPD?

Luckily Robicheaux is still on the wagon or we would see him swirl into drink, despair... His AA outlook saves him.

Okay, I was disappointed in the lack of exploration of some of the characters. They are introduced but not fully explored -- if I had not read previous Robicheaux novels, they would have seemed hurried in their introduction.

On a scale of 1 to 10, the styling of the book gets a 9.5 -- the prose, the evocation of the scenes, the way i could practically smell the sea air/salt...

On a scale of 1 to 10, the action is a 10. Brutal, but realistic.

One item surprised me: Dave rarely talks about the daily life of being a police officer. In this novel, we get a few paragraphs on how difficult (the things you see, the people you interact with, the smell of it...) it can be to be a cop.

Whenever I finish a James Lee Burke novel or watch NYPD Blue, I think, Man, I wish I could craft something as clear, true and compelling as this.

While travelling through Missoula, MT this summer, I almost looked up James Lee Burke in the phone book, to call and say, "Thanks for creating such a robust, honest, tough character
." But then I thought, heck, if he's like Robicheaux, he doesn't need my interruption. He wrote the book because he had demons to exercise and wanted to help people -- his written civil duty.

Buy it tonight. Don't plan on sleeping much.