Creole Belle: A Dave Robicheaux Novel Mass Market Author: Visit Amazon's James Lee Burke Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1451648146 | Format: PDF
Creole Belle: A Dave Robicheaux Novel Mass Market Description
Review
"This tale plays out much like "The Glass Rainbow--"intimations of mortality; melancholic musing on the pillaging of once-Edenic South Louisiana; cathartic, guns-blazing climax--but, as always, Burke brings something new to the table . . . Dave and Clete may still be unbowed, but they are certainly broken--and all the more interesting for it."--"Booklist" (starred review)
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
About the Author
James Lee Burke, a rare winner of two Edgar Awards, and named Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, is the author of more than thirty previous novels and two collections of short stories, including such
New York Times bestsellers as
Light of the World,
Creole Belle,
Swan Peak,
The Tin Roof Blowdown, and
Feast Day of Fools. He lives in Missoula, Montana.
See all Editorial Reviews
- Series: Dave Robicheaux
- Mass Market Paperback: 624 pages
- Publisher: Pocket Books (August 27, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1451648146
- ISBN-13: 978-1451648140
- Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 4.2 x 1.3 inches
- Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Recovering in the hospital from the life-threatening injuries he received at the end of "The Glass Rainbow" Dave Robicheaux is visited in what seems like a morphine dream by a Cajun singer called Tee Jolie Melton, who leaves him an iPod featuring the song "My Creole Belle," a haunting piece of music which comes to obsess Dave. Upon his release, the New Iberia detective learns that Tee Jolie's sister Blue has washed up dead on the Gulf shore encased in a huge block of ice.
Dave's friend Clete Purcel is drawn to a different young woman, named Gretchen, whom he believes is his long lost daughter, and whom he fears might be the assassin behind the killings of several local criminals with mob ties. Working together Dave and Clete discover connections to a broader conspiracy involving sex trafficking, art theft and unscrupulous oil industry executives.
In "Creole Belle," all of James Lee Burke's trademark talents are on prodigious display: his lyrical prose, his poetic rendering of both landscape and character, and his ability to weave current events seamlessly into the story (in this case the Gulf oil spill.) There has been a distinct sense of finality to these last few Robicheaux novels, as both character and writer age, and I love the elegiac melancholy with which Dave's and Clete's kinship is rendered, which also manages to be celebratory. They (and we, at least while we are immersed in Burke's wonderful words) are hurtling toward the bright light of some great and final truth and each mission seems to bring them closer to redemption, even as violence and darkness threatens to pull them back. Here's hoping they both eventually ring that "belle." But not too soon.
The good news is that CREOLE BELLE by James Lee Burke is a new Dave Robicheaux novel. The issue of whether or not there would be another after THE GLASS RAINBOW was in doubt, given its deadly and somewhat ambiguous ending, as haunting a conclusion as one is likely to have read. The great news is that CREOLE BELLE, which is by turns haunting, poetic, violent, somber and inspiring, is one of Burke's best novels to date.
One does not sustain the type of damage that Dave Robicheaux did at the conclusion of THE GLASS RAINBOW without consequence. Thus CREOLE BELLE opens with Dave recuperating at a medical facility in New Orleans, his injuries alleviated with the dangerous mercies of a morphine drip that blends distant memory and fantasy with reality. His perceptions are thus in flux when he receives a visit from a young and beautiful woman named Tee Jolie Melton, a good soul whose life is nonetheless a walking car wreck.
Dave had encountered and attempted to assist her on numerous occasions while both on and off duty as a detective with the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department. When she leaves him an iPod with his favorite tunes, including "Jolie Blon" and "My Creole Belle," he believes it to be an act of kindness and nothing more. What he subsequently learns, however, is that Tee Jolie and her sister Blue had disappeared weeks before her appearance at his bedside.
After his release from the hospital, Dave begins to receive late-night calls from Tee Jolie, who alludes to being held against her will. Yet these phone calls appear to be a product of his imagination as well. His family and associates are concerned that he is experiencing fever dreams at best and the aftereffects of morphine withdrawal at worst.
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