The Washington Times
published my review of James Lee Burke’s The New Iberia Blues.
Fans of James
Lee Burke’s character Dave Robicheaux are glad that the New Iberia,
Louisiana, Cajun detective has returned in “The New Iberia Blues,” a sequel to
last year’s “Robicheaux.”
They should also be glad to know that Mr.
Burke is currently working on the third novel to this trilogy.
In “The New Iberia Blues,” Dave
Robicheaux, an elderly but physically active sheriff’s detective,
pays a visit to Desmond
Cormier, whom he knew in New Orleans when the young man was a street
artist with ambitions to become a Hollywood director and Dave
Robicheaux was a New Orleans police officer.
“Desmond
Cormier’s success story was an improbable one, even among the many
self-congratulatory rags-to-riches tales we tell ourselves in the ongoing saga
of our green republic, one that is forever changing, yet forever the same, a
saga that also includes the graves of Shiloh and cinders from aboriginal
villages,” Dave
Robicheaux, the novel’s narrator, explains to the reader in the
beginning of the crime novel. “That is not meant to be a cynical statement. Desmond’s
story was a piece of Americana, assuring us that wealth and a magical kingdom
are available to the least of us, provided we do not awaken our own penchant
for breaking our heroes on a medieval wheel and revising them later, safely
downwind from history.”
Desmond
Cormier was raised by his poor grandparents on the Chitimacha Indian
Reservation in the back room of a general store on a dirt road before the
casino operators came to town. Like his grandparents, he belonged to that group
of mixed blood Indians unkindly called redbones, the Cajun detective tells us.
A thin and frail boy, he lifted weights and became large and muscular. He later
waited tables in the French Quarter and was a street artist when he told Robicheaux
that he was going to make movies. When Robicheaux
appeared skeptical, Cormier
asked the Catholic police officer if he still went to church and Robicheaux
replied that he did.
“That means you believe in
the things that are on the other side of the physical world. That’s what
painting is. That’s what making movies is. You enter a magical world others
have no knowledge of,” Cormier
said.
While visiting Cormier
25 years later in New Iberia, Robicheaux
looks through Cormier’s
telescope and sees a young woman floating in the bay on top of a wooden cross.
Both Cormier
and his sinister houseguest, Antoine Butterworth, deny seeing the girl, but a
young sheriff’s deputy confirms what Robicheaux
saw.
And the
homicide investigation begins, while new bodies tally up the number of
ritualistic homicides that may be related to the young woman nailed to the
floating cross.
You can read the rest of the review via the below link:
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