COLETTE'S LIST

Brief Reviews Writ Loud

by Colette Bancroft

Blood On The Bayou

THE WIND IS RISING OFF THE SALT, stirring the Spanish moss in the branches of the cypresses in Bayou Teche. In a gold-lit kitchen in an old farmhouse, a pretty woman and a dark-haired girl make a summer supper of ham-and-onion sandwiches and potato salad as the light falls from the sky.

Somewhere out beyond the fringe of sugar cane fields next door, a body lies hidden, buried in a levee, sunk in the river with a chain around its neck, stuffed in a car trunk and wrapped in an old carpet stiff with blood.

And somewhere beyond that is a story, one that its actors have tried very hard to bury, erase, at least rewrite, but a story that keeps coming back, demanding to be told, leaving more and more bodies in its terrible wake. It is an old story, a story about race, or sex, or money, or power, or, usually, all of those things.

Moving between the warm kitchen and the bloody story, doing what he can to keep them apart, is Dave Robicheaux. Police detective in New Iberia, former New Orleans cop, longtime AA member, Vietnam vet, Cajun native of the southern Louisiana landscape, Robicheaux is one of the most compelling series characters in mystery fiction.

He's also a direct descendant of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. Despite the superficial differences of time and place -- Marlowe's L.A. in the '40s and '50s is at once more sophisticated and less violent than Robicheaux's present-day Louisiana -- the characters share both an unshakeable moral compass and an ability to act as catalysts, to enter into those old hidden stories and jar them loose, peel away the years of lies and expose them.

Robicheaux is no cerebral observer. He works among people he's known all his life, and their stories are often inextricably woven with his. He solves cases by rattling cages, digging up dirt, pissing people off, even throwing punches. He has a temper and a towering sense of pride, and sometimes he agonizes over them, though just as often he works by instinct and sorts out the bodies afterward.

Burke has not only created a strong series character in the 10 Robicheaux novels, he has elaborated a richly detailed setting and a fine supporting cast. The human and natural landscape of southern Louisiana is so vivid in his pages you can see the herons fishing solemnly in the swamp and the neon shining on Canal Street after a rain. He's especially deft with dialogue, making fine distinctions among the myriad accents and dialects of New Orleans and the bayou country.

For evidence that Burke is at the top of his game, just crack a copy of Sunset Limited, the new Robicheaux. From its first page, the old stories and new ones twist around each other like a nest of moccasins.

Robicheaux meets with a childhood friend, Megan Flynn, Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist and passionate fighter for underdogs. Megan is also "one of those rare women gifted with eyes that could linger briefly on yours and make you feel, rightly or wrongly, you were genuinely invited into the mystery of her life."

That mystery is a considerable one, stretching back to the day 40 years before that Robicheaux and his father found the body of Megan's father, labor organizer Jack Flynn, crucified on the side of a barn. That unsolved crime, which left Megan and her brother, Cisco, to grow up tough in a series of foster homes, would seem to have no connection to Megan's current cause, the conditions at the Iberia parish jail as reported to her by a small-time thief named Cool Breeze Broussard.

Nor would it seem to be related to Cisco's current project. A successful filmmaker, he's overseeing a local shoot, but there are security problems that seem to have something to do with the Mob. The shoot is taking place at a former plantation home owned by the wealthy Terrebonne family, which has its own problems, notably the alcoholism and less-than-genteel sexual escapades of Lila Terrebonne, granddaughter of a U.S. senator and daughter of the imperious Archer Terrebonne.

To find out if there are connections, Robicheaux has to answer many questions. Why does Megan make a play for Robicheaux's old buddy, private detective and walking train wreck Clete Purcel? Why is Cisco so close to a spooky ex-con named Swede Boxleiter, and why does Swede's face grin out from one of the shocking photos that launched Megan's career? Is the jailer's mistreatment of Cool Breeze coincidental racism, or does a dead woman connect them? What do the Terrebonnes have to do with Jack Flynn? And why are the movie's director and his daughter such thorough creeps? (One surmises that when one of the early Robicheaux novels, Heaven's Prisoners, was made into a film in 1996, Burke's experience was less than rewarding.)

As is usual in Burke's books, there's no one villain at work, and the surprises keep coming right up to the final pages. Through his tight focus on a small slice of the South, he often cuts to the heart of bigger issues -- relations between the races and the sexes, the rich and poor, fathers and daughters, present and past.

Colette's Archive

Colette's List 1: Hiaasen: Murder Under The Palms

Colette's List 2: Hall, MacDonald & More Murder

Colette's List 3: Crews: The Artist As Scar Lover

Colette's List 4: Mosley: Easy In The City Of Angels

Colette's List 5: Chandler: Trouble Is My Business

Colette's List 6: Mango, Mortal Sin & Margaritaville

Colette's List 7: A Monstrous Regiment of Women

Colette's List 8: The Inferno: James Ellroy's L.A.

Colette's List 9: Spenser Is Parker, Only Taller

Colette's List 10: Tony Hillerman: The Navajo Way

Colette's List 11: Small Towns, Mean Streets

Colette's List 12: Blood On The Bayou

Colette Bancroft, a writer known at various times in her career to date as The Goddess of the Classroom, The Empress of Haute Cuisine and The Spitball Queen, is at work on a mystery novel of her own. She is an editor on the Metro Desk at the St. Petersburg Times.

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