Beauty and horror in the bayou

By my count this is the ninth Dave Robicheaux novel by James Lee Burke; over the series, the consistency and excellence of tone, style and subject matter are enough to take one's breath away. Set in New Orleans and in the Southern Louisiana bayou country, the books are redolent of the miasma of dark and violent deeds, lightened only somewhat by the hero's stubborn efforts to reveal them and bring the perpetrators to justice.

Robicheaux is a complex character, but so are the villains he goes up against. Although a member of the police force - a sheriff's deputy, in fact - he is not averse to dealing out summary justice when the need arises, and his partner in most of these escapades, Clete Purcel, is a psychotic whose only saving graces are his loyalty to Robicheaux and his hatred for the low lifes his friend pursues.

Our protagonist's background has been built up over the span of previous novels: he owns a fishing tackle and bait shop in the bayou near the town of New Iberia, living in a house his late, hardcase father built; his first wife was shot and killed and he is now married to his childhood sweetheart, Boots; also part of the household are Alafair, a girl he rescued from a plane crash and adopted, and an old Negro man named Batist who works in the bait shop. At various stages over the saga these people have been put in danger because of Robicheaux's activities, the girl being kidnapped, Boots having to shoot someone in order to save her spouse's life; in this latest offering, Batist is subjected to a terrible beating. But somehow they survive, and the chronicle continues.

Here Robicheaux becomes involved in trying to prove the innocence of outcast Aaron Crown, imprisoned for the murder of a black civil rights activist. Buford La Rose, scion of an old white Southern family, is the man whose efforts helped in no small way to convict Crown, and, now that he is running for election as State governor, he has no wish to see the case being worked over once again.

As with all of Lee Burke's plots, nothing is as it seems, and as the narrative unfolds, layer upon layer of deceit is uncovered. La Rose's wife, Karyn, with whom Robicheaux once had an affair, appears to have an agenda of her own, while the brother of the murdered rights worker has his own reasons for maintaining the status quo. Add to this the threatening presence of one Mookie Zerrang, as monstrous a villain as ever our author has created, and you have tasty a read.

The pleasures to be got from Lee Burke's novels emanate from many quarters, not the least of them being his expertise at describing the Cajun wetlands of South Louisiana. Again and again, in images Technicolored yet exact, he brings that exotic countryside to life, the flora and fauna, the sudden thunderstorms, the cascade of sunlight through water worlds of iridescence, the varying moods of the Atchafalaya swamp, the roll and slide of the sea, and the glorious, heart-stopping colours of dawn and sunset:

"We went down the Atchafalaya, with the spray blowing back across the bow, then we entered a side channel and a bay that was surrounded by flooded woods. Under the sealed sky, the water in the bay was an unnatural, luminous yellow, as though it were the only element in its environment that possessed colour. Up ahead, in the mist, I could see the shiny silhouette of an abandoned oil platform, then a canal through the woods and inside the tangle of air vines and cypress and willow trees a shack built on wood pilings."

It is typical of Lee Burke's writing that beauty and corruption should both be facets of the same elemental forces, and what Robicheaux finds in this shack in its fairytale setting is horrible almost beyond telling. But tell it he does, and it is my fervent hope that he will go on doing so for the foreseeable future. {CORRECTION} 96082700002