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It is 1934 and the Depression is bearing down when sixteen-year-old Weldon Avery Holland happens upon infamous criminals Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow after one of their notorious armed robberies. A confrontation with the outlaws ends as Weldon puts a bullet through the rear window of Clyde's stolen automobile.
Ten years later, Second Lieutenant Weldon Holland and his sergeant, Hershel Pine, escape certain death in the Battle of the Bulge and encounter a beautiful young woman named Rosita Lowenstein hiding in a deserted extermination camp. Eventually, Weldon and Rosita fall in love and marry and, with Hershel, return to Texas to seek their fortunes.
There, they enter the domain of jackals known as the oil business. They meet Roy Wiseheart -a former Marine aviator haunted with guilt for deserting his squadron leader over the South Pacific - and Roy's wife Clara, a vicious anti-Semite who is determined to make Weldon and Rosita's life a nightmare. It will be the frontier justice upheld by Weldon's grandfather, Texas lawman Hackberry Holland, and the legendary antics of Bonnie and Clyde that shape Weldon's plans for saving his family from the evil forces that lurk in peacetime America and threaten to destroy them all.
"Starred Review. Epic... [Burke] writes with great assurance and wisdom, as well as a kind of bitter nostalgia for lost innocence." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. A wonderful slice of midcentury American life overlaid with the roiling drama of individual lives as only Burke can portray them." - Booklist
"Beautifully composed and tragic, Wayfaring Stranger is a sweeping historical epic of war and the American dream." - ShelfAwareness.com
"Similar in sweep to Edna Ferber's Giant, this intricately plotted novel is recommended to readers interested in dramatic renderings of the societal changes of postwar America. While there is the suspense that Burke's fans expect, they will find the pace slower than in his previous novels." - Library Journal
This information about Wayfaring Stranger was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
James Lee Burke is a New York Times bestselling author, two-time winner of the Edgar Award, winner of the CWA Gold Dagger and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, 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.
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