James Lee Burke is an acknowledged master, who writes complex and compelling mysteries set in the dying wetlands of Louisiana, and his way with words is often compared to Faulkner. This, the 22nd novel in his Dave Robicheaux series, moves like a dream verging on nightmare as Dave laments the corruption eating away at the land and the people in New Iberia Parish and beyond.
Dave doesn't know many success stories, but Desmond Cormier’s rags-to-riches tale is a rare exception. Dave first ran across Desmond as a scrawny street kid living rough in New Orleans, dreaming of Hollywood and a career in the movies.
Now, 25 years later, Robicheaux arrives at Cormier’s Cypremort Point estate. Desmond Cormier is the next big Hollywood director, with a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination. Cormier's come back to Louisiana to shoot his new film, which everyone involved is convinced will be a masterpiece, comparable to John Ford's iconic My Darling Clementine (1946). But Dave isn't there to welcome the Prodigal Son home.
Dave and a young deputy called Sean McClain have discovered the body of a young woman who’s been crucified and dropped into the bay. She was found floating off Cypremont Point. Cormier and his house guest, Antoine Butterworth claim complete ignorance, but Dave is suspicious enough to do some digging and discover Butterworth's unsavory reputation in California.
The dead woman was a volunteer with the Innocence Project, doing preliminary interviews with death row prison inmates. She was adopted as a baby by a local black minister and his wife. Her adoptive mother is deceased, and her adoptive father is devastated by his daughter's murder.
Then more murders occur, each of them somehow associated with cards from the tarot. The murderer is making some point, but it's hard to see how the victims are linked other than the tarot connection and the increasing violence of their deaths.
Suspects include not just Cormier and Butterworth, and Lou Wexler, the producer of Cormier's film (who's making a play for Dave's daughter Alafair); but an escaped Texas death row inmate, Hugo Tillinger, who's been spotted in the area; a psychopathic serial killer, Smiley Wimple (who has crossed Dave's path before); and a corrupt sheriff's deputy, Axel Devereaux. As always, Dave's former partner, Clete Purcel (now a private investigator) and his daughter Alafair, get involved in the investigation, putting themselves at risk too.
And then there's Bailey Ribbons, a former school teacher now a sheriff's deputy, who's partnered with Dave. She's beautiful and vulnerable and much too young for Dave, but she doesn't think so.
James Lee Burke was born in Houston, Texas, but spent most of his childhood on the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast. He attended the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the University of Missouri, receiving a BA and MA in English Literature from Mizzou.
At various times he worked as a truck driver for the U.S. Forest Service, as a newspaper reporter, as a social worker on Skid Row, Los Angeles, as a land surveyor in Colorado, in the Louisiana State unemployment system, and in the Job Corps in the Daniel Boone National Forest in Eastern Kentucky. He taught at five different colleges before getting on the tenure track teaching creative writing at Wichita State University before he became a best-selling author.
He's won numerous awards and several of his novels have been made into films.
Burke and his wife, Pearl, live in Montana. They have four children, including Alafair Burke, a law professor and best-selling crime writer.
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