Crime writer James Lee Burke returns to Louisiana where his hero, Dave Robicheaux, sleuths his way through a hotbed of sin and uncertainty. For Dave, life in Louisiana is filled with haunting memories of the past - images from Vietnam, the violent streets of New Orleans, and his own troubled youth. In Crusader's Cross, a deathbed confession from an old schoolmate resurrects a story of injustice, the murder of a young woman, and a time in Robicheaux's life he has tried to forget.
Her name may or may not have been Ida Durbin. It was back in the innocent days of the 1950s when Robicheaux and his brother, Jimmie, met her on a Galveston beach. She was pretty and Jimmie fell for her hard - not knowing she was a prostitute on infamous Post Office Street, with ties to the mob. Then Ida was abducted and never seen again.
Now, decades later, Robicheaux is asking questions about Ida Durbin, and a couple of redneck deputy sheriffs make it clear that asking questions is a dangerous game. With a series of horrifying murders and the sudden appearance of Valentine Chalons and his sister, Honoria, a disturbed and deeply alluring woman, Robicheaux is soon involved not only with the Chalons family but with the murderous energies of the New Orleans underworld. Also, he meets and finds himself drawn into a scandalous relationship with a remarkable Catholic nun.
The aging Robicheaux has led a full life—full of loss, violence, and evil. Critics agree that
Crusader’s Cross is a worthy addition to the series. It’s all here—the violence, the power plays, the class and racial tensions, Robicheaux’s stubbornness, the Louisiana landscape, and, of course, the references to crosses. As usual, Burke takes readers deep inside his protagonist’s heart to show how one man deals with the world’s evils, and it’s the lyrical writing and palpable scenes that make that possible. Some tangled subplots and a weak rendering of women (including Robicheaux’s daughter) barely detract. If you believe "that beauty and horror go hand in hand," notes the
Washington Post, Burke "can touch you in ways few writers can."
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
Starred Review. Superb writing and a throbbing pace lift two-time Edgar-winner Burke's powerful, many-layered 14th Dave Robicheaux novel (after 2003's
Last Car to Elysian Fields), which involves venal and arrogant members of a wealthy family that can trace its lineage to fifth-century France as well as the machinations of the New Orleans mafia. A conversation between Robicheaux and a dying childhood friend about Ida Durbin, a young prostitute that Robicheaux's half-brother, Jimmie, loved and lost in the late 1950s, sets the ex-homicide detective on a path that eventually leads to several gruesome killings and his near downfall. Unemployed, his wife dead, his daughter in college, Robicheaux rejoins the New Iberia, La., sheriff's department at the urging of Sheriff Helen Soileau, who needs an extra hand as the murders mount. While the tendrils of the sometimes rambling plot unfold, Robicheaux and his impulsive former police partner, PI Clete Purcell, seek retribution for injustices caused by a wide range of corrupt villains. Burke masterfully combines landscape and memory in a violent, complex story peopled by sharply defined characters who inhabit a lush, sensual, almost mythological world.
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*Starred Review* "The person who believes he can rise to a position of wealth and power in Louisiana without doing business with the devil probably knows nothing about the devil and even less about Louisiana." Anyone who doesn't assume those words were spoken by James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux doesn't read mysteries. There are bent rich guys sipping bourbon on nearly every Spanish Moss-lined patio in New Iberia Parish, and Robicheaux's Cajun blood boils at the thought of each one of them. As Clete Purcell, Dave's saner-than-he-looks pal, remarks near the beginning of this thirteenth entry in the series, "We're back . . . to rich people you can't stand. There's a pattern here, big mon." Yes, there is a pattern, but those who object to the similarity in Burke's plots and themes miss the bigger picture. Patterns are inevitable, in life as in nature, and much of the satisfaction of living life and observing nature comes in identifying both the patterns and the variations, which is exactly what Burke does in this series. This time a serial killer on the loose takes Robicheaux back to 1958 and an encounter he and his brother had with a prostitute. Burke's remarkable lyricism hits its most plaintive notes when he re-creates lost moments from the past, but this time those moments must be reinterpreted, much as his assumptions about the new batch of bent rich guys must be reexamined. And in the midst of all that, Robicheaux's personal life is transformed in the most unlikely of circumstances. Surprise lurking in the crevices of a recurring pattern: that's nature at its most beautiful, and Burke at his most eloquent.
Bill OttCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
