Creole Belle [by] James Lee Burke
New York; Simon & Schuster [2012]
978-1-4516-4813-3; $27.99
Our hero, Dave Robicheaux, is fighting to recover his health after a gunman put a bullet in his back a month ago. The morphine is also recalling a fierce addictive behavior that used to be his before years of 12-step programs and sheer resolve put that on the back burner for him. He is convinced that singer Tee Jolie Melton came to see him, and put some songs on his iPod.
Then he learns that Tee Jolie’s sister Blue has been found dead in a floating block of ice in the Gulf. Dave resolves to find Tee Jolie and to learn what happened to Blue. His best friend, Clete Purcel, decides to help him.
However, Clete is also involved in his own troubles. He’s discovered that one of his one-night stands had produced a child, unbeknownst to him, who may be working as a contract killer named Caruso. She has come gunning for some of New Orleans’ worst. When she drops in on Clete, they decide they really like each other, no matter what happened in the past, and he takes her – when she’s not a contract killer, her name is Gretchen – on as an assistant of sorts.
There are several members of a family with deep historic ties to the area who keep cropping up in their investigation. Varina, who is the daughter of Jesse LeBoeuf, an old Cajun swampman, has the hots for Clete, although she is still married to Rick Dupree, who has piles of money and a big southern mansion on a neighboring bayou. He has enormous power, and oars stuck in the economy everywhere, especially in oil and religion. His father/grandfather – the relationship may be a bit blurred in the family history – claims to have been a prisoner at one of the Nazi concentration camps, but Dave sees him as about as opposite a person as he can be to the persona he has invented, and believes him to have been a Nazi and one of the guards. Meanwhile, Jesse LeBoeuf has shown his true colors once again – he’s one of those southerners who just has to taste the flesh of a black girl, even while he hates them, and tries to destroy their menfolk. He takes his latest rage out on a female deputy in the Sheriff’s department. And this whole family seems to be behind an assortment of good ol’ boys, obvious crooks and perverts, and religious fanatics, as well as oil impresarios, whose current activity with the oil spill in the Gulf, remind Dave of his father’s death on a rig many years before. Dave’s daughter Alafair makes friends with Gretchen, and plan to do a documentary film on a show coming to their town.
Everything rather comes to a head at the end of the book, when our two galloping justice-seekers take on the family at its enclave next to the bayou. It’s rough and bloody, and very much what Clete and Dave have been known to do in the past, although this one has a vast and overarching theatricality all its own. Makes you happy they’re on our side! Typical Burke and absolutely recommended (if you can stomach the gore.) ~ lss-r
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Library book.
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