Burning Angel (Dave Robicheaux Mysteries) - Hardcover

Burke, James Lee

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786860820 ISBN 13: 9780786860821

Publisher: Hyperion, 1995

Synopsis

Defending an African-American farm family from local mobsters who want their land, Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux travels from his native New Orleans to Central America in pursuit of a notorious gambler and hit man.

About this title

About the Author:

James Lee Burke, a rare winner of two Edgar Awards, and named Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, is the author of thirty previous novels and two collections of short stories, including such New York Times bestsellers as The Glass Rainbow, Swan Peak, The Tin Roof Blowdown, Last Car to Elysian Fields, and Rain Gods. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

From Publishers Weekly:

In his latest absorbing and violent adventure, moody Louisiana deputy Dave Robichaux confronts plaited evils: ages-old injustices based on race and class; the legacies suffered by modern-day mercenaries for their sins in Vietnam and central America; and the New Orleans mob. Old Bertha Fontenont comes to Dave for help in claiming the property that was promised her sharecropper ancestors 95 years earlier. Moleen Bertrand, heir of the plantation where that property lies and where Jean Lafitte was rumored to have buried gold, is planning to bulldoze the Fontenont cottages. At the same time, Sonny Boy Marsallus, a local whose escapades in the Guatemalan jungle have given him a reputation for a preternatural ability to survive, has asked Dave to hold on to his journal while he tries to steer clear of some vengeful Mafia-hired hit men. As Bertrand's personal life, secretly intertwined with another Fontenont, surfaces, Dave faces a thug said to have trained Idi Amin at an Israeli jump school and also gets suspended (after losing his temper and causing some serious damage at a Mafia hangout). Burke's lush, humid prose and the controlled, otherworldly aspects of this plot deftly capture the inhumanity of the bad guys and the more common frailties of ordinary folk. It's sometimes hard to keep track of who's good and who's bad in this foggy moral terrain, but the confusion has the feel of real life. Series fans will be glad that Dave's wife, Bootsie, isn't troubled by her lupus condition and will marvel that their adopted daughter Alafair, now a teenager, is old enough to need to know how to shoot. $250,000 ad/promo; 22-city author tour; audio release from Simon & Schuster.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hyperion
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0786860820
• ISBN 13: 9780786860821
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352