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James Lee Burke

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Every Cloak Rolled in Blood (A Holland Family Novel) Kindle Edition

by James Lee Burke (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.2 2,908 ratings

Book 4 of 4: Holland Family

Editors' pick Best Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

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In his most autobiographical novel to date, James Lee Burke continues the epic Holland family saga with a writer grieving the death of his daughter while battling earthly and supernatural outlaws.

Novelist Aaron Holland Broussard is shattered when his daughter Fannie Mae dies suddenly. As he tries to honor her memory by saving two young men from a life of crime amid their opioid-ravaged community, he is drawn into a network of villainy that includes a violent former Klansman, a far-from-holy minister, a biker club posing as evangelicals, and a murderer who has been hiding in plain sight.

Aaron’s only ally is state police officer Ruby Spotted Horse, a no-nonsense woman who harbors some powerful secrets in her cellar. Despite the air of mystery surrounding her, Ruby is the only one Aaron can trust. That is, until the ghost of Fannie Mae shows up, guiding her father through a tangled web of the present and past and helping him vanquish his foes from both this world and the next.

Drawn from James Lee Burke’s own life experiences, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood is a devastating exploration of the nature of good and evil and a deeply moving story about the power of love and family.

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Editorial Reviews

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Praise for Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

"Stunning...this is one of those extraordinary crime novels that feels more like real life, with incidents and people that aren’t obviously connected piling up in the protagonist’s life, rather than a neat set of clues pointing to a culprit. Once again, Burke uses genre fiction to plumb weighty issues, both social and emotional." –STARRED review, Publishers Weekly

“Burke rolls together the driving themes that have dominated his work—the inescapable presence of evil, the restorative power of love, the desecration of the planet, humanity's long slouch toward Armageddon—into an intensely, heartrendingly personal exploration of grief.” -STARRED review, Booklist

"Less mystery than history, less history than prophecy, and all the stronger for it."– Kirkus Reviews

Praise for James Lee Burke

“James Lee Burke is the reigning champ of nostalgia noir.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Burke’s work transcends genre classification.”—Philadelphia Inquirer

“Burke’s evocative prose remains a thing of reliably fierce wonder.”—Entertainment Weekly

“In a world of overstuffed, overwritten ‘blockbuster’ books, it’s a pleasure to pick up 243 perfect pages with not a word or comma out of place. James Lee Burke doesn’t need filler to flesh out his stories… one of the finest novelists in North America.” —Margaret Cannon, Globe and Mail

"You can always count on Burke, the prolific best-selling author and two-time winner of the Edgar Award, to deliver a white-hot page-turner."—AARP Magazine

“James Lee Burke is one of a small handful of elite suspense writers whose work transcends the genre, making the leap into capital-L Literature.” —Bookpage

“Burke remains an icon of the crime fiction world and one of its truly great practitioners, packing more soul and more poetry into a paragraph than some authors can manage in a book.” —CrimeReads

“In many of Burke’s books, he breaches the curtain between what we think of as the real world and the past, the supernatural, the alternative, whatever lies on the other side...invit[es] the reader into a potent vision of the battle between good and evil that animates all his fiction.” —Colette Bancroft, Tampa Bay Times

“Incorporating elements of horror into otherwise realistic thrillers is a thing these days, but few manage it with Burke's special eloquence, at once melancholic and macabre.”—Bill Ott, Booklist (starred review)

About the Author

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One Chapter One
I GAZE UPON THE season from my veranda and know all too well its gaseous vapors and fading colors and deceptive embrace. An orange sun hangs in the cottonwoods down by the river, backdropped by the razored peaks of the Bitterroot Mountains. For me, the sun’s lack of warmth is a harbinger of our times, or at best a sign of our collective ephemerality. But please don’t be taken aback. Age is not kind, and it leaves a mean stamp on an elderly man’s perceptions.

A red Ford F-150 pulls to a stop on the dirt track between my barn and the river. There’s a bullet hole in the back window, frosted around the edges like a crisp of ice. A gangly teenage boy vaults over the tailgate and can-sprays a black swastika on the door of my barn. His stomach is flat as a plank, his hair grown over his ears. He pisses in my cattle guard while rotating his head on his neck, his urine flashing in the sunlight.

I walk down the slope, the air damp and tannic from the decomposition of leaves. The boy climbs back into the bed of the pickup and bangs his fist on the cab’s roof. The driver wears a red cap. A man in the passenger seat turns his head slowly toward me, his salt-and-pepper hair scalped around the ears, his face insentient, perhaps hardened by the elements or a life ill chosen. A beer can rests on the dashboard. The truck drives away, swaying in the potholes.

“You don’t belong here!” the boy shouts, trying to keep his balance, a childlike grin on his face, one that seems incongruent with the nature of his visit. “Go somewhere else!”

He shoots me the bone, his free hand cupping his package.

A HALF HOUR LATER a state police trooper gets out of her cruiser with a clipboard and fits on her campaign hat. She brushes her nose with the back of her wrist, as is our wont during the virus that has changed our culture. She can’t be over five-two. Her hair is thick, the color of slate, her skin tanned, her eyes recessed and bright and happy like those of a young girl who is curious about the world. She asks me to tell her everything that happened. When I finish, she makes no comment, and I wonder if I have overestimated her.

“My description doesn’t help much?” I said.

“You didn’t get a tag number?”

“There was mud on the plate.”

“The dispatcher said you’ve had trouble out here before,” she says.

“Kids who threw a sack of pig guts in my yard.”

“Why would anyone want to paint a swastika on your barn?” she says.

“They don’t like me?”

She puffs one cheek, then the other, as though rinsing her mouth.

“I called 911 because I’m required to do so by my insurance company,” I say. “I appreciate your coming out. I doubt anything will come of this, so let’s forget it.”

“How about giving me a chance to do my job?”

“Sorry.”

“How old are you?”

“Eighty-five. Why do you ask?”

“You don’t look it.”

“It’s Dorian Gray syndrome.”

She looks into space, then at the two vehicles parked among the maple trees in my front yard. “You live with others?”

“I’m a widower.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I live by myself.”

“You look like Sam Shepard. You know, the actor?”

I don’t reply. For many people who have had a recent personal loss, superficial conversation has an effect like an emery wheel grinding the soul into grit. The swastika on my barn door seems to become uglier and more intrusive as the day grows colder and more brittle, like winter light on a grave.

“Hello?” she says.

“Yes?”

“I mentioned Sam Shepard as a compliment. Know any white supremacists hereabouts?”

“I’ve seen some people at the grocery and the PO with AB tats.”

“Where did you hear about the Aryan Brotherhood?”

“Bumming around.”

“You didn’t try to take a picture of the truck or the kid shooting you the finger?”

“I don’t have a cell phone.”

“You’re the writer, aren’t you?”

“I’m ‘a’ writer.”

“I think there’s something you’re not telling me, Mr. Broussard. I think you stirred up some white supremacists. I’ve seen your letters to the editor.”

“White supremacists don’t read the editorial page.”

“Can I make a suggestion?”

“Why not?”

“Stay away from these guys. They’re not just racists. They mule the meth that gets brought into the res from Denver and Billings. I don’t think the high number of murdered and missing Montana Indian women is coincidence, either. Are you listening, sir?”

“These guys who sprayed my barn weren’t dope mules. They’re leftover nativists. They think their time has rolled around again.”

“Nativists? You’re not talking about Indians?”

“Nope.”

She takes a business card from her shirt pocket and writes on it and hands it to me. “That’s my cell number on the back.”

“Why the special treatment?”

“You read Oscar Wilde.”

“Pardon?”

“You mentioned Dorian Gray. I assume you know who wrote the novel.”

The skin on my face shrinks.

“I read one of your books,” she says. “I think you’re a nice man, Mr. Broussard. But you need to take care of yourself. There’s some mean motor scooters down in the Bitterroots.”

The name on her card is Ruby Spotted Horse. “Officer, I didn’t mean—” I start.

She gets in the cruiser and starts the engine and hooks on a pair of yellow-brown aviator glasses, then rolls down the window. “Did you lose your daughter recently?”

“Yes, I did.”

“I’m sorry for your loss, sir.” She looks in her outside mirror. “Watch out. I don’t want to run over your foot.”

I nod but don’t speak, which is what I do when others mention my daughter’s death. I still haven’t dealt with her loss, and I probably never will.

Ruby Spotted Horse makes a U-turn and drives down the dirt lane, the sun’s reflection wobbling like an orange balloon trapped inside her rear window.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09JPH6XHJ
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster (May 24, 2022)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 24, 2022
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2164 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 284 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #263,530 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #1,179 in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Literary Fiction
- #6,164 in Cozy Animal Mysteries
- #10,342 in Suspense (Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews:
4.2 2,908 ratings

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James Lee Burke

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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’s authored thirty-seven novels and two short story collections. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

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susan lyon

James Lee Burke once again delivers a masterpiece

Reviewed in the United States on May 25, 2022

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James Lee Burke is my favorite writer. Since first discovering his work, I have managed to collect everything he has published with the exception of two of his early works I can't find and as I can I will replace 6 of his novels that are paperback with hardback volumes. I carry my shopping list everywhere I go! His stories are rich, real and his style of writing is classical. I can honestly "see" his characters, events and the landscapes he paints with words.

When I heard this book was coming out, I pre-ordered it through Amazon (thanks for supporting great writers)
and received it today. I have read it cover to cover and can honestly say it is one of his best stories!

James Lee Burke is an honest man. He lays it all on the line. His personal character always shines through on the subjects in the books. His own experiences are laid bare for all to see through the actions of the people in his books. I highly recommend this book and all the others he has written.

12 people found this helpful

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Richard B. Schwartz

JLB utilizes the supernatural to achieve . . . what he has always been able to reach without it.

Reviewed in the United States on May 28, 2022

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I have been critical of recent books by JLB, principally because of the injection of supernatural elements in what is supposed to be a ‘realist’ genre. Supernatural elements are not new here; In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead (1993) had such elements but they could be attributed to LSD. In Every Cloak Rolled in Blood the supernatural elements are omnipresent (though the protagonist has taken Prozac, which doesn’t cause visions and paranormal events). My ‘problem’ is with audience expectations/genre/reader response. If you are reading a realist narrative you respond to the characters and plot arcs within those constraints associated with realism. The sudden interposition of supernatural elements is jarring because you are not reading a ghost story per se, but, instead, encountering a ghost from the machine. The reader feels cheated or tricked and, most of all, confused.

In the promotional material for this new novel we are told that it is very personal and ‘autobiographical’. The protagonist, Aaron Holland Broussard, is shattered by the death of his daughter Fannie Mae, an act of evil in a world of evil, more specifically a world of meth and opioid dealers, pseudo evangelists, a former Klansman, a biker gang, and so on. It is also a world with the ghosts of union soldiers who slaughtered native people (not just the memory of them, but their ghostly/physical presence). Aaron takes comfort in the presence of Ruby Spotted Horse, an officer of the law with a basement (literally) filled with ghosts. And, yes, Fannie Mae makes frequent appearances, talking to Aaron and attempting to help and direct him.

The supernatural/preternatural/magic realist elements continue throughout the novel as Aaron attempts to do the right thing in his particular corner of modern Montana, but also seeks personal redemption in a vast world of past and present ghosts. Since the ghosts are central to the plot and appear throughout the novel we have a greater sense of coherence than in some of JLB’s other recent work and since JLB has himself recently lost his daughter Pamala (and is the same age as his protagonist Aaron) we catch the drift of the autobiographical element: losing a child is horrific; the emotional canvas—including a sweeping sense of past and present evil—is vast and the emotional terms automatically entail a sense of the supernatural and a desire to hold on and communicate with the lost child.

In struggling with questions of genre I arrive at the conclusion that JLB’s new novel is not so much a novel as a variation of romance. Hawthorne wrote romances and Moby Dick is far more of a romance than a novel. Searching the tap roots of emotion and history, JLB searches those of American literature and makes a key reference to the western stories of A. B. Guthrie. Crime fiction, like the western, emerges from chivalric romance and JLB also makes reference here to the Song of Roland. However, we still have something of a strange brew here; chivalric romance is different from ‘romance’ in the sense of a prose narrative in which character is subordinate to ideas. (Raymond Chandler is influenced by chivalric romance, but the principal writer of ‘tales’—the short form of ‘romance’, Kafka, is doing something quite different.) And Aaron himself writes science fiction, which is ‘otherworldly’ but not romance per se. Science fiction actually emerges from pastoral. It juxtaposes good worlds with bad worlds, though sometimes distancing them in time rather than in space.

So here’s my bottom line: Every Cloak Rolled in Blood is romantIC, in the sense that the narrative comes out of the tradition of romantic poetry more than the tradition of the realist novel. The principal text of Coleridge and Wordsworth’s drawn line in the sand, Lyrical Ballads, is Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. That is a story of an experience that is powerful but almost (like the titanic emotional elements of high romanticism) incommunicable. It is a story about personal feelings, but on the cosmic stage, feelings so personal that they transcend the realism of the day to day and embody the supernatural, reducing the teller to a nearly deranged, impassioned disrupter of weddings who grabs you by the collars of your formal clothes and attempts to convey to you the heights and depths of his personal, life-changing experience.

That personal experience is part and parcel of the thrust of romantic poetry. That literary art is not realist and it is not mimetic. It is expressionist. It grasps for ways to communicate the incommunicable. When it is done well it is magnificent; when it is done badly it is silly. JLB’s story here is wonderful but it is, like high romanticism, a little shaky around the edges. The bourgeois version of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is Robinson Crusoe, a far more down to earth realist narrative, but one that is replete with ideas and large issues. Its historical influence has been tremendous, but it lacks the grandeur and electricity which the high romantics occasionally reach. JLB goes for the gusto. The fact is that he has always been able to reach the heights without utilizing the supernatural and has done so over a lifetime of writing. In the Acknowledgments of Every Cloak Rolled in Blood, JLB refers to his great (Montana) novel, The Lost Get-Back Boogie, a heart-breakingly beautiful, realist narrative that was rejected 111 times before LSU Press published it and it was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize. Many of his readers wish that he would stay in what for them and for him has been more familiar territory.

23 people found this helpful

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Loren W. Christensen

Love this writer

Reviewed in the United States on March 14, 2024

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What beautiful writing is all about

Reviewed in the United States on September 18, 2023

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I've been a fan of James Lee Burke for quite a few years. This is not my favorite of his books. There was a lot of politics and expression of thoughts that I felt did not add to the story at all. I got the impression, although I may be wrong, that this is his last book and that he wanted to express his personal opinions on politics and life. I probably would not buy another book of his after this one.

One person found this helpful

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Nancy Moore

Every Cloak…

Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2023

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It is always a total experience reading a James Lee Burke novel. His phraseology is poetry. No matter how hard the situations may be or how ugly, his prose wraps around them like tendrils of ivy. The scenes in this novel are hypnotic and fantastic. I highly recommend you read it.

One person found this helpful

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loridah

Sometimes depressing.

Reviewed in the United States on November 7, 2022

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I like James Lee Burkes's books. I actually met him once at Cafe Des Amis in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana on a Sunday afternoon along with his wife Pearl. A very humble man and overall nice person. It was a pleasure to meet him. Although some of his books can be a little depressing, I always root for his characters to come out on top. Thank you Mr. Burke for displaying Louisiana. I love his description of the different areas. Most of which I have been to along with staying at a bed and breakfast across the street from his parents home and across from the Sheriffs office where Detective Dave Robicheaux works out of. Also have been to Victorias cafeteria downtown New Iberia. Thank you again Mr. Burke.

4 people found this helpful

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kindle_addict53

Beautifully written, but makes Cormac McCarthy seem like a comedian by comparison.

Reviewed in the United States on May 26, 2022

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One man's dark night of the soul, filled with remorse and self-condemnation. To quote Aaron Holland Bussard: Psychoneurotic anxiety and agitated depression coupled with an ideational personality produce a combination that is like being boiled alive.
I feel like I have been boiled alive right along with him. The way he paints humanity is as brutal as he is on himself. The bar he raises is beyond reach. Toward the end he makes the claim that 'the great sin is dying before you know what your raison d'etre is'. An impossible feat for those of us who are not saints.
I may admire the unsparing honesty James Lee Burke examines in himself and the world at large, and God knows the man has a gifted way with words, but maybe before I read his next book I will pound rusty nails into my own eyes instead.
I'm going to go read something really silly now.... Discworld, here I come!

9 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Kevin Flynn

outstanding

Reviewed in Canada on July 13, 2022

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Fans of James Lee Burke will be thrilled by this extraordinary novel. Burke has reached an altogether new level in an exceptional career. The prose fairly shines with intesity and beauty.

Heath Savage

Burke Strikes Again!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 15, 2024

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One of the greatest writers of the 20th and 21st centuries. Splendid. I cannot wait to read it again!

Decency must prevail

Achingly beautiful

Reviewed in Australia on August 10, 2023

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A beautiful, sad, exquisite read. I love this author- he makes me feel in a way no other writer does.
Suggestion: read this book looking out of a window in a silent room

Paul Ruffell

Disappointed

Reviewed in Canada on August 12, 2022

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I have loved of these novels and the prose that Mr. Burke uses to spin his tales. However, this last one delves too far into the supernatural and the story suffers as a consequence. I’m sad, because I wanted to remember this series differently.

I plan to find one of his early novels and re-read a tale of the Bobbsie twins of homicide to make myself feel better.

One person found this helpful

Ron Suffolk

Every cloak rolled in blood

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 1, 2023

Verified Purchase

Different to previous books of J.L. Burke that I have read previously in the past but still a good read.

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Every Cloak Rolled in Blood (A Holland Family Novel) Kindle Edition

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