About this item
WAYFARING STRANGER begins in West Texas in 1934 and is narrated by Weldon Avery Holland, cousin of Burke's series charcter, Texas lawman Hackberry Holland (Feast Day of Fools) . At age sixteen, Weldon encounters Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker traveling with their accomplices after having just pulled off one of their notorious armed robberies. Weldon is smitten by Bonnie (who contrary to her cigar-smoking photos was very attractive) , but because of Clyde and Bonnie's duplicity and the disrespect they show his grandfather, Weldon ends up putting a bullet through the rear window of Clyde's stolen automobile.The story then jumps to 1944 and the Ardennes Forest and the Battle of the Bulge, where Second Lieutenant Weldon Holland saves his sergeant, Hershel Pine, from death by suffocation when he is buried alive in his foxhole under the treads of a Waffen SS Tiger tank.
About the Author
James Lee Burke is an American author best known for his mysteries, particularly the series. He has twice received the Edgar Award for Best Novel, for in 1990 and in 1998. Burke was born in Houston, Texas, but grew up on the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast. He attended the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the University of Missouri, receiving a BA and MA from the latter. He has worked at a wide variety of jobs over the years, including working in the oil industry, as a reporter, and as a social worker. He was Writer in Residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, succeeding his good friend and posthumous Pulitzer Prize winner John Kennedy Toole, and preceding Ernest Gaines in the position. Shortly before his move to Montana, he taught for several years in the Creative Writing program at Wichita State University in the 1980s. Burke and his wife, Pearl, split their time between Lolo, Montana, and New Iberia, Louisiana. Their daughter, Alafair Burke, is also a mystery novelist. The book that has influenced his life the most is the 1929 family tragedy "The Sound and the Fury" by William Faulkner.
