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Summary
Summary
Louisiana lawman Dave Robicheaux returns in an adventure as timely as real life. Detective Robicheaux, driven by a keen sense of right versus wrong in the fight against crime following Hurricane Katrina, has his own demons of alcoholism and rage to contend with as well.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Burke's meticulously textured 16th Dave Robicheaux novel (after 2006's Pegasus Descending), Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath provide the backdrop for an account of sin and redemption in New Orleans. When Detective Robicheaux's department is assigned to investigate the shooting of two looters in a wealthy neighborhood, he learns that they had ransacked the home of New Orleans's most powerful mobster. Now he must locate the surviving looter before others do, and in the process he learns the fate of a priest who disappeared in the ill-fated Ninth Ward trying to rescue his trapped parishioners. Burke creates dense, rich prose that draws the reader into a web of greed and violence. Each of his characters feels the hands of both grace and of perdition, and the final outcome of their struggle is never quite certain. Burke showcases all that was both right and wrong in our response to this national disaster, proving along the way that nobody captures the spirit of Gulf Coast Louisiana better. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
I wanted to wake to the great, gold-green, sun-spangled promise of the South Louisiana in which I had grown up. I didn't want to be part of the history taking place in our state. That sentence wouldn't be out of place in any of Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels, all of which have been distinguished by their elegiac tone, but it's only fitting that it should appear in his latest, a heartfelt post-Katrina ode to a lost New Orleans and a lost world. In a sense, Dave Robicheaux, Burke's Cajun detective, whose heart is in the past and whose eyes are on the horizon, expecting trouble, has always been anticipating Katrina--or at least some form of cataclysm--as he has watched his world spin further and further out of control. But Katrina was no fictional event, and Burke writes about its aftermath as vividly and powerfully as any nonfiction chronicler. The plot itself, the investigation of the murder of two black men in the ninth ward, hinges on familiar Burke tropes--the powerless caught in a web of circumstance; surprising acts of nobility from the least likely people; unfathomable evil prompting eruptions of Robicheaux's thinly suppressed rage--but the novel's power comes from the way it explores the tragedy of Katrina in a way that is perfectly in tune with the series, a kind of perfect storm brought together by the confluence of fictional and nonfictional realms. --Bill Ott Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IF I'd been asked to bet on who'd write the definitive crime novel about Hurricane Katrina and the devastation of New Orleans, my money would have been on James Lee Burke. And that's just what he delivers in THE TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN (Simon & Schuster, $26), a hardboiled cops-and-robbers yarn that puts a human face on anonymous acts of good and evil in the chaos and horror of this natural disaster and its manmade aftermath. Harnessing all his poetic skills, Burke delivers his dispatches in torrents of sorrow and rage. Seen from this vantage, the hurricane sweeps in with fierce majesty, shredding the fragile coastline and lingering to toy with the most helpless of its victims. When it finally moves on, "the damage in New Orleans," Detective Dave Robicheaux remarks, is "of a kind we associate with apocalyptical images from the Bible." The images Burke chooses - of abandoned hospitals, "Visigoth"style vandalism and pandemonium at the Convention Center - are memorable in their own hellish ways. But the sights that really burn your eyes are grimly surreal: a dead baby hanging from the branches of a tree and "thousands of shrieking birds" circling overhead, "as though they had no place to land." And the question that stays with you is posed by an old man poking through the rubble, looking for his drowned wife: "How come nobody come for us?" James Lee Burke The scene that haunts more than one character is set in the Lower Ninth Ward, where Father Jude LeBlanc ventures into the floodwaters and disappears. When last seen, he's being attacked while climbing onto the roof of a church from a motorboat, ax in hand, trying to rescue a group of parishioners trapped in the attic. After the pummeling the state has taken, the legal system in southern Louisiana is barely functioning. Like other ablebodied police officers, Robicheaux is reassigned from his home base of New Iberia to cover crimes in New Orleans, in his case the shooting of two looters who unwittingly robbed and trashed the home of a New Orleans mobster. But Father LeBlanc, known around town as "the junkie priest," was a friend of Robicheaux's, and he makes LeBlanc's fate a priority mission as he navigates the city looking for forensic evidence - and for answers to some of the deeper mysteries of human behavior. The novel's expansive plot allows Robicheaux to grapple with the good, the bad and the morally confused, while its biblical theme gives even the worst criminals a chance to repent and make amends. And while Burke blames neither God nor nature for the ruination of New Orleans, he can't forgive the federal government for contributing to the city's vulnerability, then turning its back on the ensuing destruction. Although not in any conventional way a genre novel, Rupert Thomson's DEATH OF A MURDERER (Knopf, $23) says a great deal about the impact of evil on people who consider themselves civilized. As beautifully written as it is provocative, this psychological study places a decent man in close proximity to a malevolent force - and settles back to watch. In terms of action, nothing much happens; but by the end of this subtly disturbing story, life itself seems a lot more precious. The murderer of the title, who remains unnamed, is clearly Myra Hindley, a partner in the notorious Moors Murders that caused England to tremble for its children in the 1960s. Dead of natural causes after decades in prison, she is lying in a mortuary and her body must be guarded until its cremation. A police constable named Billy Tyler pulls the graveyard shift, and before the long night is through he'll be visited by an apparition of this monstrous killer, who dares him to acknowledge his own dark side. Billy is a good man, if not a deep thinker, and his admissions of guilt - mainly about his feelings for his dull wife and a daughter with Down syndrome, but also about old friends and a lost love - are more pathetic than damnable. Still, he shows his bravery by looking evil in the eye and acknowledging that it's not an entirely unfamiliar sight. VICTORY SQUARE (St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95) marks the end to Olen Steinhauer's grim but fascinating police procedurals set in an unnamed Soviet-bloc nation very much like Romania. Emil Brod, the thoughtful protagonist of this wellplotted series, has grown more fatalistic since we met him as an idealistic young cop in "The Bridge of Sighs," but sliding into retirement isn't an option in the charged political climate following the breakup of the Soviet Union. Not in 1989, when revolution is in the air and the lieutenant general of the Ministry for State Security has just been murdered. While it seems contrived to force a causal relationship between Brod's first case and his last assignment as chief of the murder squad, Steinhauer doesn't dwell entirely on the past. As Brod tries to go about normal business in a police state that's about to collapse, currents of rebellion and pro-democracy fervor sizzle in the air, and this story catches all the danger and excitement of the historic moment. THE TENDERNESS OF WOLVES (Simon & Schuster, $25), a first novel that won the Costa (formerly the Whitbread) Award for Stef Penney, initially presents itself as a claustrophobic 19th-century murder mystery, set in the dead of winter and confined to Dove River, an isolated European settlement on the edge of the Canadian frontier. Or so it seems when Penney's narrator, Mrs. Ross, one of the settlement's hardy pioneers, discovers the scalped corpse of a local fur trader. But when her 17-year-old son, Francis, disappears on the same day, the novel abandons its whodunit component and expands into a more ambitious form. Once Mrs. Ross strikes out in search of her son, "The Tenderness of Wolves" becomes a wilderness adventure with heavy doses of romance and native history, handled in a graceful, almost delicate, style, but strangely devoid of the thrills you'd expect in such a savage place. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Burkes detective, Dave Robicheaux, is reassigned to New Orleans.
Kirkus Review
A looting and shooting at the height of Hurricane Katrina's destruction sucks Dave Robicheaux (Pegasus Descending, 2006, etc.) into New Orleans's purgatorial ordeal. After hijacking a boat from a junkie priest who was fighting to rescue a crowd trapped in a church attic by Katrina's rising waters, bail jumper Andre Rochon, together with his teenaged cousin Kevin and armed-robbery specialists Eddy and Bertrand Melancon, runs into both good fortune and bad. Breaking into florist/gangster Sidney Kovick's house, the looters find thousands in cash and a trove of blood diamonds. But when they try boosting some gas from insurance agent Otis Baylor, whose traumatized daughter Thelma recognizes them as the men who raped her after her senior prom, a single gunshot leaves one of them dead and another a helpless paraplegic, left to the mercy of the city's monumentally overburdened hospital system. Seconded from Iberia Parish to help the NOPD cope with the epidemic lawlessness, Robicheaux finds himself tangling with his eye-for-an-eye buddy Clete Purcel, Kovick's gangland establishment, scary private eye Ronald Bledsoe and the usual quota of femmes fatales and lowlifes. Apart from the operatically scaled evocation of the hurricane, a shattering portrait Burke was born to create, the most striking creation here is Bertrand Melancon, a lost soul who can't decide whether he's an avenger or a penitent. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In his many years of service with the New Orleans police department and the New Iberia sheriff's department, Dave Robicheaux has faced evil and danger in its many forms. But his life is about to change as New Orleans-"the city that care forgot"-is about to fall victim to a catastrophe that will dwarf all the ills that have previously beset it. As Hurricane Katrina sweeps into the city, residents who were not able to flee can't begin to know that even worse destruction will occur when the levees fail. With the city in chaos, law enforcement officers from New Iberia are called in to help restore a semblance of order. As Dave gets pulled into the turmoil, his wife and daughter are about to face their darkest hour. This is one of Burke's best and will keep listeners enthralled. Will Patton's performance makes the author's prose sing. This book is essential for all libraries, as Burke has captured in eloquent fiction an event that allowed us to see "an American city turned into Baghdad." Highly recommended.-Theresa Connors, Arkansas Tech Univ., Russellville (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.