Creole Belle: A Dave Robicheaux Novel Author: James Lee Burke | Language: English | ISBN:
B0061Q5MO6 | Format: EPUB
Creole Belle: A Dave Robicheaux Novel Description
“America’s best novelist” James Lee Burke returns with another
New York Times bestselling entry in the Dave Robicheaux thriller series (
The Denver Post).
Set against the events of the Gulf Coast oil spill, rife with “the menaces of greed and violence and man-made horror” (
The Christian Science Monitor),
Creole Belle finds Dave Robicheaux languishing in a New Orleans recovery unit since surviving a bayou shoot-out. The detective’s body is healing; it’s his morphine-addled mind that conjures spectral visions of Tee Jolie Melton, a young woman who in reality has gone missing. An iPod with an old blues song left by his bedside turns Robicheaux into a man obsessed…And as oil companies assign blame after an epic disaster threatens the Gulf’s very existence, Robicheaux unearths connections between tragedies both global and personal—and faces down forces that can corrupt and destroy the best of men.
- File Size: 3365 KB
- Print Length: 541 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 140910897X
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster (July 17, 2012)
- Sold by: Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc
- Language: English
- ASIN: B0061Q5MO6
- Text-to-Speech: Not enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,225 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #78
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
- #78
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
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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