Part of Series
As a child he was frightened by the stories... It's out there, under the salt of the Gulf of Mexico, off the Louisiana coast—a buried Nazi submarine. Detective Dave Robicheaux of the New Ibera Sheriff's office has known if its existence since childhood, when he was terrified by nightmares of the evil Nazi sailors just offshore. Then, as a teenager, he stumbled upon the sunken sub while scuba diving—but for years he kept the secret of its watery grave. ... And now he must face the terrible reality. But decades later, when a powerful Jewish activist wants the sub raised, Robicheaux's knowledge puts him at the center of a terrifying struggle of conflicting desires. A neo-Nazi psychopath named Will Buchalter, who insists that the Holocaust was a hoax, wants to find the submarine first—and he'll stop at nothing to get Robicheaux to talk. James Lee Burke looks long and hard into the human heart of darkness in his most electrifying novel yet, a story of terror and courage in a Southern Louisiana where the horrific and the beautiful rise from the same fertile soil.
Author
James Lee Burke is an American author best known for his mysteries, particularly the Dave Robicheaux series. He has twice received the Edgar Award for Best Novel, for Black Cherry Blues in 1990 and Cimarron Rose in 1998. Burke was born in Houston, Texas, but grew up on the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast. He attended the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the University of Missouri, receiving a BA and MA from the latter. He has worked at a wide variety of jobs over the years, including working in the oil industry, as a reporter, and as a social worker. He was Writer in Residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, succeeding his good friend and posthumous Pulitzer Prize winner John Kennedy Toole, and preceding Ernest Gaines in the position. Shortly before his move to Montana, he taught for several years in the Creative Writing program at Wichita State University in the 1980s. Burke and his wife, Pearl, split their time between Lolo, Montana, and New Iberia, Louisiana. Their daughter, Alafair Burke, is also a mystery novelist. The book that has influenced his life the most is the 1929 family tragedy "The Sound and the Fury" by William Faulkner.
