Creole Belle

At age 75, James Lee Burke has only gotten better. As a two-time winner of the Edgar Award and a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, he has produced the 19^th novel in the Dave Robicheaux series which may be the best yet. There are times when his prose is poetic, and he frequently uses his characters and the conflicts he puts them in to sprinkle in bits of his own wisdom about life. On the one hand, I find myself going slowly, savoring the writing, not just rushing through to follow the story line to its conclusion. But on the other hand, after letting his particular people and their dilemmas come into rich form, I could not put the book down for the last 150 pages. Burke captures not only the great beauty in life and relationships, but he also writes about dark ugly crevices of human existence, and it is the tension that he creates between those two extremes which holds me spellbound.

As much as this series of books is about Dave, this story was also about Dave’s longtime partner and running mate, Clete Purcel. The story was about family and friendships and how far they can be pushed and tested. Dave is an alcoholic who has been sober for many years, but Clete is still abusing himself with multiple substances in significant quantities. But Clete is the man who Dave has trusted and will trust with his life, the man he trusts more than any other. The story begins with Dave in the hospital where he is recovering from the gunshot wounds from his last battles with the bad guys. Clete was also wounded, but not nearly as badly as Dave. It’s dangerous for an addict to be treated with morphine for pain, but Dave’s injuries left him little choice. Was it a morphine-induced hallucination when Tee Jolie Melton, the Creole Belle, appeared at Dave’s hospital bedside and told him about her encounters with some bad men in the oil business which happened to be the primary source of income for the State of Louisiana? How could it have been a hallucination when she left him an iPod to listen to in his hospital bed? It was not a hallucination when Tee Jolie’s little sister Blue was found in a block of ice. Still in recovery from his injuries and still using morphine, Dave was hardly in any condition to figure out the difference between reality and his imagination.

Through Dave’s recovery, we learn that his adopted daughter Alafair graduated from Stanford Law School, but rather than follow a promising career with the Justice Department, she had returned to Louisiana to write novels. Clete has spawned a daughter with a woman who was a hopeless heroin and cocaine addict, a prostitute. Rather than the love and support that Alafair grew up with, Gretchen Horowitz was sexually abused from an early age, sold by her mother to bad men for her next fix. Could Gretchen be the woman known to the underworld as Caruso, an assassin who had several well-known hits in her resume? For the really evil side of the story, we get to the Dupree and Leboeuf families. The patriarch of the Dupree is Alexis, a nearly 90-year man who survived the Nazi death camp at Ravensbruck. But, why did he survive in a camp that was only for women? The granddaughter of Alexis is Varina Leboeuf Dupree, a brilliant and beautiful manipulator of men who has a history with both Dave and Clete.

Alafair and Gretchen become intrigued with each other, and that pulls them both into further danger which tests the extent of their fathers’ relationship with each other. That’s enough of the plot. There were lots of other characters and supporting subplots, all written to support the main storyline. This book gets my highest and strongest recommendation.

An example of the quality of Burke’s writing and his insight to one of the dark sides of life: “Every alcoholic knows what every other alcoholic is thinking. There is only one alcoholic personality. There are many manifestations of the disease, but the essential elements remain the same in every practicing drunk, CEO, hallelujah-mission wino, Catholic nun, ten-dollar street whore, academic scholar, world boxing champion, or three-hundred-pound blob, the mind-set never varies. It is for this reason that practicing alcoholics wish to avoid the company of drunks who have sobered up, and sometimes even get them fired from their jobs lest there be anyone in proximity who can hear their most secret thoughts.”