In the waning days of summer, 2005, a storm with greater impact than the bomb that struck Hiroshima peels the face off southern Louisiana. The book that has influenced his life the most is the 1929 family tragedy "The Sound and the Fury" by William Faulkner.Dave Robicheaux returns in an adventure as timely as real life: the fight against crime, and the fight for life in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Their daughter, Alafair Burke, is also a mystery novelist. Shortly before his move to Montana, he taught for several years in the Creative Writing program at Wichita State University in the 1980s.īurke and his wife, Pearl, split their time between Lolo, Montana, and New Iberia, Louisiana. He was Writer in Residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, succeeding his good friend and posthumous Pulitzer Prize winner John Kennedy Toole, and preceding Ernest Gaines in the position. He has worked at a wide variety of jobs over the years, including working in the oil industry, as a reporter, and as a social worker. He attended the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the University of Missouri, receiving a BA and MA from the latter. He has twice received the Edgar Award for Best Novel, for Black Cherry Blues in 1990 and Cimarron Rose in 1998.īurke was born in Houston, Texas, but grew up on the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast.
James Lee Burke is an American author best known for his mysteries, particularly the Dave Robicheaux series. This is not just a superb crime novel, it is potentially THE fictional chronicle of a disaster whose human dimensions America is still struggling to process. You can feel the undercurrents of rage and pain beneath the narrative, making this not only his most personal and deeply felt book for some time, but quite possibly his best novel to date. The nightmarish landscape created by Katrina seems the perfect setting for Burke's almost Biblical visions of good and evil - it is as if he had to wait for this disaster to find the occasion to match his emotionally supercharged prose. The story begins with the shooting of two would-be looters in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and then follows a motley group of characters - from street thugs to a big-time mob boss, from a junkie priest to a sadistic psychopath - as their stories converge on a cache of stolen diamonds, while the storm turns the Big Easy into a lawless wasteland of apocalyptic proportions. This is James Lee Burke's latest mystery featuring Dave Robicheaux.
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