Burning Angel (Dave Robicheaux Series #8)

by
James Lee Burke

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Page 1 of 17

Showing 1 – 10 of 170 (17 pages)

Overview

Helping the Fontenot family of sharecroppers from being forced away from their longtime home, detective Dave Robicheaux discovers a link between the eviction and the murder of a New Orleans fixer's girlfriend. Reprint. Tour. PW.

Ex-cop Dave Robicheaux: his wife has been murdered and now they're after his little girl. From the Louisiana bayou to Montana's tribal lands, he's running from the bottle, a homicide rap, a professional killer . . . and the demons of his past. "The plot crackles with suspense."--Los Angeles Times Book Review.

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Overview

Editorial Reviews

Detroit Free Press

Wonderful writing...Don't miss this book. It's one of the years best.

San Jose Mercury News

Pulsating Adventure.

More Reviews (5) Fewer Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Burke pits a land-hungry oil company against a Blackfeet Indian reservation in a stunning novel that takes detective fiction into new imaginative realms. His Cajun sleuth, Dave Robicheaux, an ex-New Orleans cop featured in two previous novels, attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, has recurrent nightmares about his murdered wife, and cares for an adopted El Salvadoran refugee girl. When two American Indian activists disappear, Robicheaux's dogged investigation not only sets him on a collision course with Mafia thugs and oil interests, but also leads him into a romance with Darlene American Horse, his ex-partner's girlfriend. All the main characters in this darkly beautiful, lyric saga carry heavy emotional baggage, and Robicheaux's sleuthing is a simultaneous exorcism of demons of grief, loss, fear, rage, vengeance. Burke's fictional terrain--stretching from the Louisiana bayous to Montana's red cliffs and pine-dotted hills--is uniquely his own, yet also a microcosm of a multi-ethnic America. He writes from the heart and the gut. 35,000 first printing; major ad/promo. (Sept.)

Library Journal

Burke brings back Dave Robicheaux in this gripping sequel to Heaven's Prisoners ( LJ 4/1/88). Dave, a former homicide cop, is trying to run his fishing business, care for six-year-old-orphan Alafair, and come to terms with the violent death of his wife, Annie. A chance encounter with an old friend haunted by a troubling secret sets off a chain of events that leaves Dave framed for murder. Desperate to prove his innocence and protect Alafair, Robicheaux is forced to conduct his own investigation. Robicheaux is a complex and very believable character, battling alcoholism, haunted by his wife's death, struggling to hold onto his Catholic faith. Surrounded by violence, he is a man of integrity trying to find an honorable way out. As such he should appeal to fans of Travis McGee and readers of well-crafted suspense. Skillfully evoked settings add to the book's appeal. Highly recommended.-- Beth Ann Mills, New Rochelle P.L., N.Y.

Bill Ott

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.

Jonathan Yardley

Burke is off on a chase that is at once engrossing and...convincing. -- Washington Post

Lewis Beale

Burke's writing crackles with style and authority. -- New York Daily News

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780786889044
Publisher: Hyperion
Publication date: 8/28/1996
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Edition description: Reissue
Edition number: 1
Pages: 464
Sales rank: 141,546
Series: Dave Robicheaux Series , #8
Product dimensions: 6.58 (w) x 11.02 (h) x 1.09 (d)

Meet the Author

James Lee Burke

James Lee Burke, a rare winner of two Edgar Awards, and named Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, is the author of thirty previous novels and two collections of short stories, including such New York Times bestsellers as The Glass Rainbow, Swan Peak, The Tin Roof Blowdown, Last Car to Elysian Fields and Rain Gods. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

Biography

In November 1999, The Atlantic Monthly -- under the headline, "Soft Boiled: Detectives Aren't What They Used to Be" -- noted an odd turn of events in the crime fiction genre: the strong-and-silent hero was on the wane, replaced instead by a bunch of chatty Cathys. "The 1990s detective can't shut up about anything. It's hard to go even a few pages without being assaulted by a confession of inner feelings." As an example, it offered James Lee Burke's Louisiana detective Dave Robicheaux, who "was in Vietnam 'in the early days of the war,' and this has left him with a sizable reservoir of musings about personal anger, which he taps frequently."

But put the aromatherapy away. Robicheaux -- Burke's best-known character and the launch of his financial success as a writer -- is no sensitive New Age guy. He's a police detective who holds his own on the mean streets of New Orleans, who faces the perils of alcoholism every day, and who supplements his work policing the Louisiana parish of New Iberia with running his bait shop on the bayou. Ropy with muscle, he can take -- and, if necessary -- throw a punch with the best of them.

Robicheaux is one of the stars of a series that started with The Neon Rain and continued with such titles as Heaven's Prisoners (turned into a 1996 movie with Alec Baldwin and Kelly Lynch), In the Electric Mist with the Confederate Dead and A Stained White Radiance. The other star is the Louisiana swamp country itself, which shimmers to life at the touch of Burke's pen. The smell of brackish water all but wafts off the page.

And in Robicheaux, Burke has created a complicated and often conflicted protagonist driven by a fierce moral code. "There is a pronounced streak of poetry in Mr. Burke's prose," The New York Times wrote in 1988. "He has the knack of combining action with reflection; he has pity for the human condition, and even his villains can have some sympathetic and redeeming qualities."

Like Robicheaux, Burke himself is a recovering alcoholic. He contributes his teenage drinking to his poor academic standing in high school, and it dogged him throughout much of his career as a writer. Even when he was sober for five years, he has said he still suffered from the same problems as an alcoholic and didn't truly find sanctuary until he joined a 12-step group.

His early days as a writer, in the 1960s, were marked by critical success that he thought meant he was on his way. But after his third novel met with so-so reviews, he only published one book for the next 15 years, supporting his family with an assortment of jobs -- teaching, social work, pipefitting. One novel, The Lost-Get Back Boogie, went unpublished for nearly a decade and was rejected roughly 100 times before finally being picked up by Louisiana State University Press. (It was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.)

Burke credits LSU Press for resurrecting his career. Three years later, when the third Robicheaux novel, Black Cherry Blues, was published, Burke was beginning to reach a wider audience. After the ninth, he launched a new crime series, this one featuring Texas Ranger-turned-lawyer Billy Bob Holland. Despite the shift from the swamps of Louisiana to the dusty streets of Deaf Smith, Texas, much is the same in Burke's new franchise. "The themes that stalk Dave Robicheaux through the swamps in James Lee Burke's Louisiana mysteries -- the arrogance of wealth, the corruption of power and the price a man must pay for the sins of his past -- trail Burke's new series hero, a country lawyer named Billy Bob Holland, out to Texas hill country," The New York Times wrote in a 1999 review of the second book in the series, Heartwood.

He now has a readership for both Robicheaux and Holland. But he has been careful not to take it for granted. In 1996, even after he had three straight books on The New York Times bestsellers list and was building a second home in New Iberia -- to match his house in Missoula -- Burke was vigilant about not letting the mantle of success rest too comfortably on his shoulders.

"By the time I was 35, I had three books published. I thought I was home free," he told People. "But that was vanity. I went a dozen years without selling a book. I couldn't sell ice water in hell."

Good To Know

When Burke is writing, he's typing blind. "I don't think up the stories," he told Publishers Weekly in 1992. "I'm convinced they're already written in the unconscious. My work is simply a day-to-day discovery. I never see more than two scenes around the corner and I don't know a book's ending until the last pages."

His college English papers earned him a string of D-minuses until he talked to his professor about what was wrong. "She said, 'Your spelling is an assault upon the eyeballs. Your penmanship makes me wish the Phoenicians had not developed the alphabet. But I couldn't give you an F because you have so much heart,'" he said in a 1996 interview with People. "Every Saturday I went with her and rewrote the essay for the week. I got a B and made the dean's list. (She) changed my life."

The 1993 publication of Two for Texas marked Burke's return to bookshelves after 11 years. Unable to sell a book after Lay Down My Sword and Shield, Burke finally broke the bad luck streak with his historical novel about the Texas Revolution of 1835. Kris Kristofferson starred in the 1998 TV movie adaptation, which aired on TNT.

1. Hometown:
  
  New Iberia, Louisiana and Missoula, Montana
1. Date of Birth:
  
  December 5, 1936
2. Place of Birth:
  
  Houston, Texas
1. Education:
  
  B.A., University of Missouri, 1959; M.A., University of Missouri, 1960
2. Website:
  
  http://www.jamesleeburke.com/

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

HER hair is curly and gold on the pillow, her skin white in the heat lightning that trembles beyond the pecan trees outside the bedroom window. The night is hot and breathless, the clouds painted like horsetails against the sky; a peal of thunder rumbles out an the Gulf like an apple rolling around in the bottom of a wood barrel, and the first raindrops ping against the window fan. She sleeps on her side, and the sheet molds her thigh, the curve of her hip, her breast. In the flicker of the heat lightning the sun freckles on her bare shoulder look like brown flaws in sculpted marble.

Then a prizing bar splinters the front door out of the jamb, and two men burst inside the house in heavy shoes, their pump shotguns at port arms. One is a tall Haitian, the other a Latin whose hair hangs off his head in oiled ringlets. They stand at the foot of the double bed in which she sleeps alone, and do not speak. She awakes with her mouth open, her eyes wide and empty of meaning. Her face is still warm from a dream, and she cannot separate sleep from the two men who stare at her without speaking. Then she sees them looking at each other and aim their shotguns point-blank at her chest. Her eyes film and she calls out my name like a wet bubble bursting in her throat. The sheet is twisted in her hands; she holds it against her breasts as though it could protect her from twelve-gauge deer slugs and double-aught buckshot.

They begin shooting, and the room seems to explode with smoke and flame from their shotgun barrels, with shell wadding, mattress stuffing, splinters gouged out of the bedstead, torn lampshades, flying glass. The two killers aremethodical. They have taken out the sportsman's plug in their shotguns so they can load five rounds in the magazine, and they keep firing and ejecting the smoking hulls an the floor until their firing pins snap empty. Then they reload with the calmness of men who might have juststood up in a blind and fired at a formation of ducks overhead.

The sheet is torn, drenched with her blood, embedded in her wounds. The men have gone now, and I sink to my, knees by my wife and kiss her sightless eyes, run my hands over her hair and wan face, put her fingers in my mouth. A solitary drop of her blood runs down the shattered headboard and pools on my skin. A bolt of lightning explodes in an empty field behind the house. The inside of my head is filled with a wet, sulphurous smell, and again I hear my name rise like muffled, trapped air released from the sandy bottom of a pond.

It was four in the morning on a Saturday and raining hard when I awoke from the dream in a West Baton Rouge motel. I sat on the side of the bed in my underwear and tried to rub the dream out of my face, then I used the bathroom and came back and sat on the side ofthe bed again in the dark.

First light was still two hours away, but I knew I would not sleep again. I put on my raincoat and hat and drove in my pickup truck to an all-night café that occupied one side of a clapboard roadhouse. The rain clattered on my truck cab, and the wind was blowing strong Out of the southwest, across the Atchafalaya swamp, whipping the palm and Oak trees by the highway. West Baton Rouge, which begins at the Mississippi River, has always been a seedy area of truck stops, marginal gambling joints, Negro and blue-collar bars. To the east you can see the lighted girders of the Earl K. Long Bridge, plumes of smoke rising from the oil refineries, the state capitol building silhouetted in the rain. Baton Rouge is a green town full of oak trees, parks, and lakes, and the thousands of lights on the refineries and chemical plants are regarded as a testimony to financial security rather than a sign of industrial blight. But once you drive west across the metal grid of the bridge and thump down on the old cracked four-lane, you're in a world that caters to the people of the Atchafalaya basin -- Cajuns, redbones, roustabouts, pipeliners, rednecks whose shrinking piece of American geography is identified only by a battered pickup, a tape deck playing Waylon, and a twelve-pack of Jax.

The rain spun in the yellow arc lights over the café parking lot. It was empty inside, except for a fat Negro woman whom I could see through the service window in the kitchen, and a pretty, redheaded waitress in her early twenties, dressed in a pink uniform with her hair tied up on her freckled neck. She was obviously tired, but she was polite and smiled at me when she took my order, and I felt a sense of guilt, almost shame, at my susceptibility and easy fondness for a young woman's smile. Because if you're forty-nine and unmarried or a widower or if you've simply chosen to live alone, you're easily flattered by a young woman's seeming attention to you, and you forget that it is often simply a deference to your age.

I ordered a chicken-fried steak and a cup of coffee and listened to Jimmy Clanton's recording of "Just a Dream" that came from the jukebox next door. Through the open doorway that gave onto the empty dance floor, I could see a half-dozen people at the bar against the far wall. I watched a man my age, with waved blond hair, drink his

I whiskey down to the ice, point to the glass for the bartender to refill it, then rise from...

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Anonymous

Posted September 17, 2002

Another great Dave Robicheaux adventure....

I am so intrigued with the series of Dave Robicheaux novels that my wife and I leave in 2 days to visit New Iberia for a week. James Lee creates such a vivid picture of the countryside and the people in all his novels that we have to see it for ourselves.
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Burning Angel (Dave Robicheaux Series #8)

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Overview

All Available Formats + Editions

Customers Who Bought This Also Bought

More About This Book

Overview

Related Subjects

Editorial Reviews

Detroit Free Press

San Jose Mercury News

Publishers Weekly

Library Journal

Bill Ott

Jonathan Yardley

Lewis Beale

Product Details

Meet the Author

James Lee Burke

Biography

Good To Know

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Table of Contents

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Another great Dave Robicheaux adventure....