Dave's friend Clete Purcel is drawn to a different young woman, named Gretchen, whom he believes is his long lost daughter, and whom he fears might be the assassin behind the killings of several local criminals with mob ties. Working together Dave and Clete discover connections to a broader conspiracy involving sex trafficking, art theft and unscrupulous oil industry executives.
In "Creole Belle," all of James Lee Burke's trademark talents are on prodigious display: his lyrical prose, his poetic rendering of both landscape and character, and his ability to weave current events seamlessly into the story (in this case the Gulf oil spill.) There has been a distinct sense of finality to these last few Robicheaux novels, as both character and writer age, and I love the elegiac melancholy with which Dave's and Clete's kinship is rendered, which also manages to be celebratory. They (and we, at least while we are immersed in Burke's wonderful words) are hurtling toward the bright light of some great and final truth and each mission seems to bring them closer to redemption, even as violence and darkness threatens to pull them back. Here's hoping they both eventually ring that "belle." But not too soon.
Also recommended: winner of the Malice Domestic Award for best first mystery, it features a vivid desert backdrop that should please fans of James Lee Burke's colorful Louisiana setting I'm adding this review in response to a review by "cedwint" who is disappointed that James Lee Burke descends into poetic description, political commentary, and elaborate segues into background stories to help us know his characters better.
I've read a lot of this genre, and I keep coming back to Burke because of his detours. I love to see this poverty-striken part of Louisiana through his eyes; we have even visited New Iberia, Bayou Teche, St. Martinsville, Jeanrette, etc. because Burke's prose is so alluring. We knew it was romanticized, but it is part of the folly of Dave Robicheaux (and probably Burke) to be a bit of a dreamer and to see things through a haze of nostalgia. I love it that he writes about his cat and his three legged raccoon. I love it that he speaks up for the impoverished and the oppressed and gives them dignity in his novels. I love it that he takes on some of the big heavy hitters, the big time criminals - politicians and drug dealers and human traffickers and oil company executives - who are the bullies of modern society, using money and power to keep the average decent citizen powerless. I read Burke because it isn't just plot, his writing takes me to a place I've never been and makes it feel like home. Burke calls out the big guys, scorns their pretensions and heaps contempt on their arrogance.
Creole Belle is not unlike the preceding Dave Robicheaux books, I agree. James Lee Burke has an axe to grind, and I am happy to pay for my James Lee Burke books to help him grind that axe. Burke revisits the essence of his Dave Robicheaux series, the relationship of Robicheaux and Clete Purcel, the "Bobbsey Twins from Homicide", evoking his protagonist's long history in New Iberia Parish, Louisiana, the storied city of New Orleans and the lawman's friendship with PI Purcel, a wild man of great integrity who pushes the boundaries of friendship and the law in this harrowing tale. Creole Belle has all the bells and whistles of a great James Lee Burke adventure, Robicheaux in search of the missing Creole songstress Tee Jolie Melton, even while recovering from a gunshot wound, Purcel on his own collision course with life, recently hounded for an out-of-date gambling marker by thug Bix Golightly and his side man, Waylon Grimes. In spite of wife Molly's cautioning ("You're willing to help people who are corrupt to the core. You turn them into something they're not."), Dave goes on his quest in tandem with the increasingly self-destructive Purcel, who fears the daughter he never knew existed may be a contract killer.
Burke resurrects New Orleans in all its glory, immersed once more in graft and greed post-Katrina, feudal and dominated by wealth and power, with a new twist on its history of slavery, rental convict labor, the White League, the Knights of the White Camellia and corporate plantations. New Iberia Sheriff Helen Soileau turns her back on Robicheaux's outrageous actions until she has no choice but to intervene in a complex tale where a wealthy cabal insulates their nefarious activities through payoffs and graft, the face of true evil masquerading behind genteel extravagance and public-spirited events. The underbelly of the brightly painted façade is ugly and dangerous, both Robicheaux and Purcel diving in, sometimes at cross purposes, but always, ultimately together.
Complete with ghosts of the past on the decks of the paddle-wheeled Creole Belle tempting Dave to join the next world, the violence, brutality and betrayals of both friends and adversaries, colorful characters salt the pages: Count Cardona, a.k.a. Baron Belladonna, Jimmie the Dime, Wee Willie Bimstine, No Duh Dolowitz, the Merry Prankster of the Mafia, but also the more sinister Pierre and Alexis Dupree, ex-Sheriff Jesse Lebeouf, the missing Tee Jolie, her sister Blue and assorted femme fatales. Then there's Gretchen, Clete's daughter, victim of neglect and chronic abuse, pulling at the strings of Purcel's overburdened heart, while making tentative overtures of friendship to Alafair, Dave's daughter; and Dave's belief that Tee Jolie is waiting for him, her songs wafting sad and plaintive on his MP3 player. It's impossible to swim against the tide of an evocative James Lee Burke novel, filled with the wisdom gleaned of hard experience and a great compassion for the human condition, yet another reminder that "The worst thing we can do to ourselves is let other people injure us." Luan Gaines/2012. What price redemption? Redemption or shame? These and other themes are once again buried not at all deep in the minds of Dave and Clete, the famous duo in the Robicheaux novel series. As different as they are, it's never enough to dismiss them with labels of any kind, and to view them as two dudes suffering another midlife crisis doesn't begin to describe what makes them tick. Never before, I feel, will readers have read about men as complex as these. On the one hand they are tireless crusaders for justice, especially for the poor and neglected among us, yet somehow these men are most often doomed to fail, even though both have been in law enforcement off and on for many years.
After reading most of the series, I'm convinced that Burke has a near inexhaustible supply of both colorful and colorless characters who present some of the most incredible, conflicted behavior on the planet. All are expertly drawn by the author, as is always the case with Burke.
Suspense and tensions rise and fall, though most of the time they are building to yet another climax, where the reader is rarely disappointed with the cadences of the narrative. Events are often "fragmented and incoherent, like sheets of stained glass thrown upon a flagstone." Where else, I wonder, does one find this level of style and crystalline beauty combined with violence in such poetic language? My answer is: nowhere except in the works of Burke! Since I first discovered James Lee Burke years ago I have read all of his fiction, including some rare early novels set in Montana. I have obviously enjoyed his work, but I am not overly enthusiastic about this novel. There is a shift in style with heavy moralizing on the part of Robicheaux that goes on to an extent that makes it clear it is an alter-ego for Mr. Burke. I am inclined to agree with his points about environmental degradation, political corruption and individual greed. My complaint is that these political stances are not so much revealed through the action of the novel as presented as accompaning tropes which interrupt or delay the story line. It is the old question of telling aversus showing. The meditation on the place of evil in the world, presented in a quasi theological fashion has become rather bitter as he has drifted here far from his semi buddhist position in earlier novels. The introduction of an aged Waffen SS man as a sort of embodiment of evil does not quite hit the mark. I think Mr Burke wants to make him a sort of repellent/attractive force, but I never get find the appeal. The idea of unspeakable evil being perpetrated by som shadowy conspiracy for the sake of oil production is rhetorically over the top. Finally, this is a very big novel with many peripheral characters and a great deal of back and forthing. Sometimes I am at a bit of a loss if we are in Jenerette, New Iberia, New Orleans and so forth. If you are a Burke fan, you may be disappointed in this one, if you are new to his work look at some earlier novels such as White Doves or Electric Mist. I love Burke's characterizations, and the fact that I never get tired of the personalities that populate his books. The writing in this episode isn't as lush, or lyrical as usual ( although I'm glad to see the phrase 'haul your ashes' only once or twice for a change), and it was easy to figure out the surprise, but I really feel like I'm there; seeing, hearing, and smelling everything that is happening as it occurs. A tremendous feat. I await the arrival of a new Burke masterpiece each summer. Creole Belle downloaded into my Kindle, I settled in read it, but after the first paragraph I knew that Burke didn't write this book. His characters are there doing what they've done but show themselves in pale comparison to their ancestors dating back to Burke's earliest books. Burke's richness and flourish and magical use of words, his remarkable syntax that carves sentences like they were strokes on a Master's painting are absent. Instead there's clumsy grammar, odd word choices, loose and sometimes confusing flow of the plot line fill the pages but that's about all. There were several places where I saw the Master's hand but few; in some places there are paragraphs repeated in earlier books. I can imagine a few budding authors in a writer's workshop studying the Master's style and writing a counterfeit Burke. I have been a fan since the first Dave novel and have enjoyed ever book. However, this effort has far surpassed most of them. I am still favoring a couple of the earlier ones, but this is best of Burke's efforts in recent years. I learn something new with each new book, Burke's philosophy as communicated through Dave and Clete makes me think about life and my own role on this big planet. Just an outstanding effort!Please get this book and if you are new to James Lee Burke, get them all and savor every word. I have read everything JLB has written. He has always been one of my favorite authors and having lived in Louisiana for a long time, he has the descriptions of the area dead on. This book had too much of Dave commenting on the oil spill, the state of affairs in the world, etc. Right in the middle of an action scene, it stops to let Dave go on and on for two or three pages. It made the book overly long and I was tired of it before the ending. Maybe Mr. Burke needs to let Dave and Clete ride off in the sunset and get some new characters. I've read all of Burke's work and this one rivals all but the best. Just a tad more political rhetoric than I would wish, but as usual, Dave and Clete,mostly Clete, work through their tortured pasts,while solving a present day crime. Interesting side characters and villains and Louisiana and its history as a character. The writing is superb, lyrical and touching. This guy just writes the best stories with the most interesting characters time after time. I hope he sticks around a long time. James Lee Burke is one of my favorite authors. I thought he had slipped ever so slightly in The Glass Rainbow, but he is back for sure in Creole Belle. He is the kind of writer who is in no hurry, as he takes his time to create a scene, to describe and build his characters, and to lead the plot along. But it rarely feels slow. I enjoy taking my time to read him, to savor his words, his artistry, and even the poetic feeling I get from reading his verbal construction. Creole Belle had quite a bit going in the plot department, and sometimes I thought it might be too much. But the reward for it was great. I felt that the climax of the novel was as intense as any I have read. So much of his focus is on the evil that men do, but mortality is taking an ever more prominent place in his writing. Other reviewers have done such a better job than me in singing his praises, but I want my voice here as well, so I write this review in simple admiration. I once remarked that if I were forced to live on a deserted island for one year with only the books of one author to read, it would be James Lee Burke. He is a living American treasure with his elegiac sometimes poetic prose. No one writes more accurrately or more beautifully of the people, places, events in New Orleans and the Southern Louisiana environs. He is a wordsmith of the first order with his uncanny skill to paint "word pictures" that come to vivid life in the mind of the reader--no where is this more in evidence than in his continuing ability to masterfully create atmosphere with his prose that allows the reader to vicariously see, smell, and feel the scenes. I am convinced that if fictional characters could somehow be made to walk the streets of the French Quarter, I would recognize Dave and Clete immediately.
While recovering from the near fatal wounds from his last adventure, "The Glass Rainbow", Dave is visited by someone out of his past, Tee Jolie Melton. This hazy visit which is ignored by most of his family and friends sets Dave on a quest to find her and return her to her family--a quest that is accelerated when the body of her sister, Blue, washes ashore frozen in a block of ice. In short order, Dave and his best friend, Clete Purcel, are neck deep in an insidious plot that encompasses the most powerful economic and political forces in Louisiana suddenly aligning all their considerable power against our protagonists. The wealthy and arrogant Dupree family headed by patriarch, Alexis, and his grandson, Pierre, and Pierre's supposedly estranged wife, Varina, are soon arrayed against Dave and Clete who are shocked to discover that they and their families are suddenly in the crosshairs of a conspiracy that surrounds an evil cabal wrapped into crimes of murder, extortion, sex trafficking, blackmail, oil spill coverups, and worse.
Of particular interest is the fact that Clete is an equal player in this novel as he believes he has discovered a lost daughter, Gretchen Horowitz, who has emerged in the area as an extemely deadly mob hitperson who may have orders to take out Dave and his family. As the always conflicted Clete struggles to discover and reconnect with his long lost daughter and help her escape her past, he discovers that both he and Gretchen are being inexorably drawn into the case he and Dave are developing against the sinister Dupree family. Who can be trusted in the large character pool in this story? How can Clete protect his daughter from the law and from Dave's morality--a question that may pit life-buddy against daughter. What dark secrets lurk behind the evil, dismissive Dupree family and their increasingly overt threats against Dave, Clete, and their families?
As usual in a Dave Robicheaux novel, plot is a secondary tool to explore the depths of the characters and the enduring friendship between two deeply flawed, deeply conflicted friends seeking the redemption that never seems more than an illusion--a redemption and resurrection that will likely never be more than a prize constantly sought but never realized, at least in their minds. Burke again masterfully highlights Dave and Clete's struggle for understanding in a world where evil and goodness, black and white, are forever obscured in a sea of gray. In that context, I found this to be one of the best books in the entire series.
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