Product Description

Texas attorney and former Texas Ranger Billy Bob Holland has many secrets in his dark past. Among them is Vernon Smothers' son Lucas, a teenaged boy about whom only Vernon and Billy Bob know the truth. Lucas is really Billy Bob's illegitimate son, and when Lucas is arrested for murder, Billy Bob knows that he has no choice but to confront the past and serve as the boy's criminal attorney. During Lucas's trial, Billy Bob realizes that he will have to bring injury upon Lucas as well as himself in order to save his son. And as a result, Billy Bob creates enemies that are far more dangerous than any he had faced as a Texas Ranger.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #69225 in Books
• Published on: 1998-06-01
• Released on: 1998-05-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 416 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780786889303
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Billy Bob Holland, the protagonist of Cimarron Rose, is an attorney in the dusty Texas town of Deaf Smith. An ex-Texas Ranger (cop, not ball-player) who mistakenly killed his partner during a drug bust, Holland is jolted from his brooding when his estranged illegitimate son is accused of the rape and murder of a party girl. He takes the case, of course, and things get complicated mighty quick. On a hunch only a father could believe, Holland is sure his son is being railroaded. Doggedly pursuing the truth, he runs afoul of sadistic cops, a powerful family, and the euphoniously-named Garland T. Moon, a feral thug with something to hide. Luckily, the folks on his team are just as tough. Burke's book isn't gritty realism--Holland's dead partner visits him often--but the characters ring true in a weird way. They are quirky and appealing, and even the criminals make good company while the whodunit unfolds.

From Library Journal
Deaf Smith, Texas, is a small town like any other. It also hides many secrets. When Billy Bob Holland finds himself defending Lucas Smothers against a charge of murder, he finds himself exposing many of these secrets in an effort to save Lucas, the son he has never acknowledged. As Holland examines the murder, he stumbles upon a DEA investigation of the town and its law enforcement officials. He also finds himself having to deal with the secrets in his own past, including the death of his partner, the loss of his father and his father's role in the life of a serial killer now in Deaf Smith, and the realization that he can deal with the anger that is within him and not let it beat him. Author Burke (Dixie City Jam, Audio Reviews, LJ 2/15/94) is a beautiful writer. His descriptions are glorious. One can almost see the ghost of Billy Bob's partner, feel the Texas thunderstorms, and see the town of Deaf Smith. However, this beautiful prose at times gets in the way of the story. Will Patton is a good reader and helps to bring the character of Billy Bob to life. Recommended for collections where Burke is popular and for large mystery collections.?Danna Bell-Russel, Natl. Equal Justice Lib., American Univ., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Before Burke launched his Dave Robicheaux series, he wrote several hard-edged, proletarian novels set in and around Texas. Now he returns to that setting for a new series that stars a Robicheaux-like character in the hardscrabble world of Deaf Smith, Texas. Billy Bob Holland, former Texas Ranger turned lawyer, is a man with a past, and when a teenager is arrested for the murder of his girlfriend, that past makes its presence felt. Billy Bob agrees to defend Lucas Smothers, knowing that the boy is his illegitimate son and realizing that the trial will bring pain to both of them. Defending his son takes Billy Bob in some other directions he isn't quite prepared to go: toward a coming to terms with his own (Robicheaux-like) propensity for violence; toward a confrontation with the intolerant, hate-filled citizenry of Deaf Smith; and deep into the past, there to revisit his great-grandfather Sam, "who fought whiskey and Indians and cow thieves and . . . watched gully washers or dry lightning spook his herds over half of Oklahoma Territory." By moving west, Burke has given new dimension to his familiar theme of a rugged individual in conflict with himself. Issues of independence versus community have long reigned supreme in the literature of the West, and Burke draws on that tradition effectively, contrasting the dusty desperation of an intolerant Texas town with the pioneer spirit of Billy Bob's ancestors. Both similar to and different from the Robicheaux books, 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. Bill Ott

Customer Reviews

Distinctively Burke, for better or worse
Having read several of James Lee Burke's novels now, I have come to see that his approach to weaving together a story is intriguingly unorthodox. His narrative is choppy and at times almost disjointed; short vignettes, encounters, and episodes are cobbled together, and change-of-voice digressions and flashbacks are not unusual. Readers accustomed to a smoother ride will find Burke's approach difficult in places.

At the same time, Burke can positively hypnotize readers through the beauty of the language he employs and his ability to capture a thought, a moment, a mood, or a concept in a few well-chosen words or phrases. This combination of organizational looseness and powerful, evocative writing makes reading Burke a truly distinctive literary experience.

In *Cimarron Rose*, Burke has taken a break from his Dave Robacheaux series and has introduced a new protagonist, Billy Bob Holland in a new setting, Deaf Smith County, Texas. Still, the overall tone and style of the story will be familiar to readers of previous Burke novels. Holland is another fallen lawman-type haunted by his past, and his similarity to Robacheaux in terms of his patterns of action and thinking are hardly surprising. The story itself is populated by desperate criminal types, fallen women, drunkards, corrupt "leading citizens," a demented maniac, and in fact, a entire cast of typical denizens of Burke's stories.

With its loosely woven whodunit plot line and its accompanying quota of broken noses and gunshot wounds, the story is a kind of classic combination of police mystery and violent pulp fiction novella. Added to this are some interesting added elements, including recurring reference to Billy Bob's great-grandaddy's journal and the regular appearance of the ghost of Billy Bob's ex-best friend and partner. Combined with a rather weird ... ending, the whole mish-mash makes for interesting reading but doesn't constitute a satisfactorily well-woven novel overall.

Despite its flaws, *Cimarron Rose* is worthwhile not only because of Burke's talents as a wordsmith, but also because of his astute eye for social and class interactions and conflict in his small-town southern setting. His descriptions of the myriad ways in which the affluent "East enders" dominate the small Texas community in which events unfold in this book shows Burke's keen understanding of the sociological and economic as well as psychological aspects of his human subject matter. Clearly, his own sympathies are with the lower classes, the downtrodden, the underprivileged, and the way he skewers the powerful and hypocritical in this book is impressive, indeed.

But Bitterroot is better!
I liked part two (Bitterroot) of James Lee Burke’s Billy Bob Holland saga so well that I gave this first part a listen on unabridged audio. Boy howdy, Billy Bob gets better with age!

Cimarron Rose is our introduction Billy Bob Holland, an attorney/former Texas Ranger (the Law Enforcement kind – not G.W.’s former baseball team) and his friends and relatives, including his dead ranger partner, L.Q. Navarro, for whose death Billy Bob, a “river-baptized” Baptist turned Roman Catholic, feels all the guilt that the latter can impose.

The plot exposes small-town caste sociology to the light - without proselytizing - like Stephen King did in the horror venue with “Carrie.” But what’s up with Great-grandpa’s journal? This reader doesn’t see the point - except to exploit the extreme predjudices of the period against Native Americans. The author’s forays (via excerpts from an old journal) into Billy Bob’s outlaw/preacher great-grandfather’s lust for the “savage” Cimarron Rose, and concomitant self-hatred, seem superfluous and gratuitous.

Burke’s writing is superb. At one point I just had to stop and write down a quote. Billy Bob (the tale is written in the first-person) is telling us about his Daddy, who had gone nearly blind as a welder. Then, “Clarity of sight” came only when he was welding “and saw again the flame that was as pure to him as the cathedrals bells were to the deaf bell-ringer Quasimodo.”

This tour of Burke’s Deaf Smith County, Texas is well worth the trip. Stay on board for Bitterroot, Montana!

Same story different setting
If you have never read a Burke novel then you may like this. If you are familiar with the Robicheaux novels, then pass this one up. I like James Lee Burke's novels, but this book is just the same story and same characters with different names and in Texas instead of New Iberia, LA. Billy Bob is just Dave Robicheaux except as a small town lawyer rather than a small town cop. He has a woman partner, has semi-adopted a young ethnic child, talks to a ghost, defends the down-trodden and his father was killed in an oil company accident just like Robicheaux's father. He deals with sketchy characters from his past and has to deal with the "psychic scars" of his past as the NY Book Review put it. Sound familiar? If you have read the Robicheaux series then, of course it does. I found myself missing the antics of Clete Purcel. Same idea here: the rich and powerful screw with the down and out. Guess who wins in the end?