Publisher's Synopsis
James Lee Burke's novel begins in West Texas in 1934, and the story opens with a fateful encounter between the narrator, Weldon Avery Holland, and the notorious Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker - a meeting which ends with the 16-year-old Holland putting a bullet through the windscreen of Clyde's stolen automobile. Weldon's education in the evils that men - and women - are capable of continues as we move to the Ardennes Forest and the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, 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.
