BookPage Top Pick in Whodunit, January 2019

James Lee Burke is one of a small handful of elite suspense writers whose work transcends the genre, making the leap into capital-L Literature. You don't have to get past the opening paragraph of The New Iberia Blues to see his mastery of the craft: "Desmond Cormier's success story was an improbable one, even among the many self-congratulatory rags-to-riches tales we tell ourselves in the ongoing saga of our green republic, one that is forever changing yet forever the same, a saga that also includes the graves of Shiloh and cinders from aboriginal villages." First-person narrator Dave Robicheaux is on hand and in fine fettle. Fans have watched Robicheaux age in real time, battling his demons, losing one wife, then another and another, raising the refugee girl he rescued from a submerged airplane when she was a small child and skating close to the edge (and sometimes over the edge) of the law. This time out, he will investigate the ritual slaying of a young black woman, nailed to a cross and left to the vagaries of the rising tide. There is a film company in town, and Robicheaux cannot shake the notion that they are somehow at the epicenter of this homicide, and as he gets closer to proving his thesis, the body count piles up. It is a long book, but I read it slowly, pausing from time to time to digest the first-rate prose, the atmospheric bayou setting and the complex interactions of people I feel I have known for 30-plus years.

 

 

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A young woman is crucified near the Cyrpemort Point estate of Hollywood director Desmond Cormier, and Det. Dave Robicheaux finds neither the director nor his actor friend forthcoming.

Det. Dave Robicheaux is haunted by ghosts, both his own and the one behind the brutal tarot-card murders. Native son Desmond Cormier is back from Hollywood, shooting part of his movie in the local swamplands of Iberia Parish, where locals are suddenly being killed in unusual ways—victims wear charms to ward off bayou evil, and signs of black magic and religious crusades mark the crime scenes. From Cormier, the religious zealot Hugo Tillinger, and Robicheaux's deadly hit-man nemesis "Smiley" Wimple, the murderer could be anyone. Robicheaux finds the blues at a crossroads—the clash between light and dark and the struggle to quell his inner demons. Will he be forced to repay the debt he owes the dead? VERDICT No one paints a picture of life in the sultry Louisiana bayou better than Burke. Readers drawn to the Cajun grit and Robicheaux's charm will love wading with him through the mists and Spanish moss of the swampland, peering into his psyche while hunting a psychopathic killer. [See Prepub Alert, 7/2/18.]—K.L. Romo, Duncanville, TX

In Edgar winner Burke's masterly 22nd novel featuring Iberia Parish, La., detective Dave Robicheaux (after 2018's Robicheaux), Hollywood director Desmond Cormier, whom Robicheaux knew 25 years earlier as a young man on the streets of New Orleans with big plans of heading to California to make movies, returns to Louisiana to shoot his next film. When the crucified body of a woman is found floating in the bay close to Cormier's waterfront estate, Robicheaux investigates. Meanwhile, his pal Clete Purcel witnesses a man leap from a moving train into the bayou. Could the presence of this man, escaped convict Hugo Tillinger, somehow connect with Robicheaux's case? Several other bodies turn up, all grotesquely staged to represent cards in a tarot deck. Robicheaux is convinced that Cormier's film crew is involved, but he soon finds himself in a shadowy world of rogue cops, mobsters, and a childlike assassin named Smiley. With his lush, visionary prose and timeless literary themes of loss and redemption, Burke is in full command in this outing for his aging but still capable hero. Agent: Philip Spitzer, Philip G. Spitzer Literary. (Jan.)