The Convict: And Other Stories » (Reprint)

James Lee Burke was struggling through some lean times as a novelist -- he had published only one book in 15 years -- when a friend and fellow writer suggested he take a stab at crime fiction. The result was The Neon Rain, the first book in his successful Dave Robicheaux books. With a complex moral protagonist and a lush writing style, the series evokes the heady environment of the Louisiana bayou country.

The Convict and Other Stories is a collection of nine award-winning and beautifully composed stories, set in locales along the Gulf coasts of Louisiana and Texas and battlefields around the world. These masterful stories are at once poignant portrayals of the rugged, conflicted Southern man as well as explorations of themes long familiar to Burke's readership: loss and hard-won courage, betrayal and friendship, violence and heroism, and the inveitability of death.

Publishers Weekly

Burke brings the reader inside the minds and emotions of his characters, in stories that strike to the heart. They each concern the search for a reason, a purpose behind the interminable battle between good and evil. ``Uncle Sidney and the Mexicans'' focuses on a maverick tomato picker, fired for petty reasons and deprived of a day's pay, who is hired by the narrator's uncle and enabled thereby both to revenge himself on his former boss and to teach a lesson about Mexicans to the local bigots. A younger narrator, in ``Losses,'' is troubled in the confessional by his priest's reluctance to condemn. Only long afterward does he comprehend the arrogance youthful innocence that refuses to countenance human flaws. The closing sentence in ``When It's Decoration Day,'' about a young Civil War soldier, elegantly epitomizes the subtle impact of Burke's storytelling: as a shell bursts, the boy ``thought he felt a finger reach up and anoint him casually on the brow.'' November 24