2015 Audie Award Finalist for Thriller/Suspense

In his most ambitious work yet, New York Times bestseller James Lee Burke tells a vintage American story through one man’s unforgettable life.

In 1934, sixteen-year-old Weldon Avery Holland happens upon infamous bad guys Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow after one of their notorious armed robberies. A confrontation with the outlaws ends with Weldon firing a weapon, unsure whether it strike its mark.

Ten years later on, Second Lieutenant Weldon Holland about Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel barely survives the Battle from the Bulge, along the way protecting the lives of his sergeant, Hershel Pine, and a young Spanish prisoner of war, Rosita Lowenstein-a woman who holds the same intimate power over him as the strawberry blonde Bonnie Parker, and is equally mysterious. The three return to Texas where Weldon and Hershel enter on the floor floor of the nascent oil business.

In just a few years’ time Weldon will spar with the jackals from the market, rub shoulders with dangerous men, and win and drop fortunes twice over. Nonetheless it is the prospect of shedding his one real love that may spur his most reckless take action yet-one influenced by that encounter way back when using the outlaws of his youth.

A tender love tale and pulse-pounding thriller, Wayfaring Stranger ‘is a sprawling historical epic full of courage and loyalty and optimism and good-heartedness that reads as an ode towards the American Wish’ (Benjamin Percy, Poets & Writers).