James Lee Burke's new 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 ...