Every Cloak Rolled in Blood - (Holland Family Novel) by James Lee Burke

About the Book

"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"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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.