Burning angel

Like a Cajun fiddler who won't let go of the last plaintive notes in a slow waltz, James Lee Burke seems able to sustain indefinitely the fever pitch of melancholia that drives his Dave Robicheaux mysteries. Wherever on-again, off-again cop Dave turns in his New Iberia, Louisiana, home, he's surrounded by the past--its slow-moving, wisteria-blooming glories and its slavery-induced horrors--but, more and more, it's the present he can't escape, the ever-encroaching floodwaters of modernity, bringing with them the drug dealers, the land developers, the dirty politicians, and the right-wing crazies, all looking to displace the memory of what was with the nightmare of what is. The battle continues here, as Dave becomes involved in the struggle of the Fontenots, descendants of black sharecroppers, to keep the land they've lived on for more than a century and which a mysterious right-wing group seems to covet. Swirling around the action is the enigmatic figure of Sonny Boy Marsallus, former soldier of fortune turned avenging angel, hunted by both mobsters and right-wingers. To Dave, Sonny is a stand-up guy who "proved to the rest of us that you could live with the full-tilt boogie in your heart." But Sonny is dead, maybe, and Dave is drifting without moorings, wondering if "history might not be waiting to have its way with all of us." It's amazing that Burke manages to keep playing this same gut-wrenching tune without its beginning to sound like fingernails on a blackboard, but every time our ears start to hurt, he finds a new way to bend the same note, and we're hooked again. (Reviewed June 1 & 15, 1995)0786860820Bill Ott

Continuing the Dave Robichaux series, Burke's mystery concerns present-day tensions springing from age-old racial injustices. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

In the last few years, the publisher has managed to build the modestly successful Burke into a best-selling mystery author with works like Dixie City Jam (LJ 4/1/94). Here, Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux tries to help the Fontenot family figure out who's trying to force them off their land‘and runs up against a nasty bunch of mobsters with ties to the notorious Sonny Boy Marsallus. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Burke's last several novels have shown a deepening fascination with the weight of past history; here, in his ninth Dave Robicheaux adventure (Dixie City Jam, 1994, etc.), a treasure buried by Jean Lafitte joins a telltale set of Vietnam- era dog tags to drag his characters down. Lafitte's gold, rumored to be buried on the Bertrand family's land, has made bad blood between Moleen Bertrand and the Fontenot family, sharecroppers on the land from time immemorial. Bertha Fontenot's legal battles with Bertrand are nothing new to her nephew and niece, Luke and Ruthie Jean, veterans of a war that's already left Bertrand's overseer dead. But Luke and Ruthie Jean have more immediate problems: They're caught in the crossfire between Johnny Carp, reigning head of the Giacano crime family, and Sonny Boy Marsallus, last of the independents. The crossfire heats up when a witness to the murder of Sonny's girlfriend, Della Landry, is kidnapped from the New Iberia prison and executed; and it isn't long before Dave, who starts out working on Della's murder, gets pulled into the current too. First, he gets sidelined from the force for soft-pedaling Sonny's killing of a mystery man threatening Dave's own turf, and then he beats up Johnny Carp in front of his own soldiers and can only wait for the inevitable payback. Meanwhile, he tries to figure out why somebody's left a broken legiron in his car and, on his windowsill, a dog tag from an old buddy missing in Laos for 30 years. As usual, Burke creates matchlessly bedeviled characters and puts them through sharp, original scenes. But the ingredients this time are so familiarthe tormented vet, the moralizing killer, the buried treasure that should've stayed buried, and of course Dave's own barely governable violencethat he seems to be writing almost as formulaically as Dick Francis. ($250,000 ad/promo; author tour)

In the last few years, the publisher has managed to build the modestly successful Burke into a best-selling mystery author with works like Dixie City Jam (LJ 4/1/94). Here, Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux tries to help the Fontenot family figure out who's trying to force them off their land?and runs up against a nasty bunch of mobsters with ties to the notorious Sonny Boy Marsallus. Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information.

In his latest absorbing and violent adventure, moody Louisiana deputy Dave Robichaux confronts plaited evils: ages-old injustices based on race and class; the legacies suffered by modern-day mercenaries for their sins in Vietnam and central America; and the New Orleans mob. Old Bertha Fontenont comes to Dave for help in claiming the property that was promised her sharecropper ancestors 95 years earlier. Moleen Bertrand, heir of the plantation where that property lies and where Jean Lafitte was rumored to have buried gold, is planning to bulldoze the Fontenont cottages. At the same time, Sonny Boy Marsallus, a local whose escapades in the Guatemalan jungle have given him a reputation for a preternatural ability to survive, has asked Dave to hold on to his journal while he tries to steer clear of some vengeful Mafia-hired hit men. As Bertrand's personal life, secretly intertwined with another Fontenont, surfaces, Dave faces a thug said to have trained Idi Amin at an Israeli jump school and also gets suspended (after losing his temper and causing some serious damage at a Mafia hangout). Burke's lush, humid prose and the controlled, otherworldly aspects of this plot deftly capture the inhumanity of the bad guys and the more common frailties of ordinary folk. It's sometimes hard to keep track of who's good and who's bad in this foggy moral terrain, but the confusion has the feel of real life. Series fans will be glad that Dave's wife, Bootsie, isn't troubled by her lupus condition and will marvel that their adopted daughter Alafair, now a teenager, is old enough to need to know how to shoot. $250,000 ad/promo; 22-city author tour; audio release from Simon & Schuster. (Aug.) Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information.