Cimarron Rose: A Novel

James Lee Burke

Sep 2014 · Simon and Schuster

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From a New York Times bestseller, “with his tangled family roots and . . . deep psychic scars . . . Billy Bob already looks like a mythic hero in the making (Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review).

Texas attorney Billy Bob Holland must confront the past in order to save his illegitimate son from a murder conviction in this brilliant, fast-paced Edgar Award–winning thriller from beloved–bestselling author James Lee Burke

Lucas Smothers, nineteen and from the wrong end of town, has been arrested for the rape and murder of a local girl. His lawyer, former Texas Ranger Billy Bob Holland, is convinced of Lucas’s innocence—but proving it means unearthing the truth from the seething mass of deceit and corruption that spreads like wildfire in a gossipy small town where everybody knows everybody else’s business.

Billy Bob’s relationship with Lucas’s family is not an easy one. Years back he was a close friend of Mrs. Smothers—too close, according to her husband. But when Lucas overhears gruesome tales of serial murder from a neighboring cell in the local lock-up, he himself looks like a candidate for an untimely death, and Billy Bob incurs enemies far more dangerous than any he faced as a Ranger.

“Billy Bob’s humanity suffuses every page with a warm, golden glow.” —Library Journal

“All the roiling intensity of the Robicheaux stories.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Cimarron Rose is a fine, multitextured novel, full of Burke’s lilting, elegiac prose and unflinching in its portrait of the human heart in turmoil.” —Booklist

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James Lee Burke is a New York Times bestselling author, two-time winner of the Edgar Award, and the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in Fiction. He has authored forty novels and two short story collections. He lives in Missoula, Montana.