{"id":7100,"date":"2018-02-27T07:24:21","date_gmt":"2018-02-27T12:24:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7100"},"modified":"2018-02-27T07:24:21","modified_gmt":"2018-02-27T12:24:21","slug":"robicheaux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7100","title":{"rendered":"*****Robicheaux"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Bayou,

photo: Bart Everson, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

By James Lee Burke \u2013 For an American story setting that immediately and richly evokes a colorful geographic, cultural, moral, and culinary milieu, it\u2019s hard to beat the hot, humid Cajun country of southern Louisiana. James Lee Burke has made Iberia Parish the primary home for his literary works, and it continues to serve him well. This new novel is his twenty-first featuring now semi-retired but perpetually on-call sheriff\u2019s detective Dave Robicheaux.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re a fan, you will expect Burke\u2019s newest crime fiction to serve up a gumbo thick with oddball characters, history, philosophy, current crises, people trying to do right, and others not caring to. You won\u2019t be disappointed. From corruption to an unhinged serial killer, this book has it all.<\/p>\n

At the outset of the story, most of which is told by Dave in first person, he sees the ghosts of Confederate soldiers marching through the swamp. The scene enables a meditation on mortality, a reexamination of grief over his wife Molly\u2019s death in an automobile crash, and a way to get at truths \u201cthat have less to do with the dead than the awareness (that life is) a continuum in which all time occurs at once, like a dream inside the mind of God.\u201d Heavy stuff for a man soon to be facing some nightmarish characters more likely spawned by the devil\u2019s imagination. Burke\u2019s Acadiana is a place where you can believe in such things.<\/p>\n

About the plot, suffice it to say that it is complex, with perhaps four main threads that Dave must tease apart and reweave into a coherent set of motives and opportunities. An unexpected subplot involves Dave\u2019s daughter Alafair (the name of Burke\u2019s real-life daughter), a mystery writer (again, as in real life<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Although the narrative follows Dave Robicheaux through the steps of his investigations, to call this a police procedural would shortchange the essence of the book. It more resembles a philosophical probe of the circumstances in which crimes can occur. An example are two of Burke\u2019s quintessential Louisiana characters, sons of old southern families, who are deeply involved in the story\u2019s events: Jimmy Nightingale and Levon Broussard.<\/p>\n

Dave notes \u201can existential difference between the two families. For the Nightingales, manners and morality were interchangeable. For Levon Broussard and his ancestors, honor was a religion, . . . the kind of mind-set associated with a Templar Knight or pilots in the Japanese air force.\u201d Such reflections on the psyches of his characters provide the sense that you\u2019re reading about living, breathing individuals, with all their baggage and capacity for the unexpected.<\/p>\n

As the mayhem of the story winds down, Dave\u2019s best friend gives his assessment of their situation in south Louisiana: \u201cThere\u2019re no safe places anymore. Everyone knows that except you.\u201d
\n<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By James Lee Burke \u2013 For an American story setting that immediately and richly evokes a colorful geographic, cultural, moral, and culinary milieu, it\u2019s hard to beat the hot, humid Cajun country of southern Louisiana. James Lee Burke has made … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"*****Robicheaux - from political corruption to an unhinged serial killer this Iberia Parish crime novel has it all.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,54,40,126],"tags":[1253,1254,1252,678,1255],"class_list":["post-7100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-detective","category-fiction","category-reading-2","tag-cajun-country","tag-james-lee-burke","tag-louisiana","tag-murder","tag-robicheaux"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1Qw","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7100"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7102,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7100\/revisions\/7102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}