Devils and saints wrestle in the mud of bayou country.
Burke returns to Louisiana’s New Iberia Parish and the late 1990s for a tangled tale that confronts private eye Clete Purcel with monsters in the present and spirits from the past.
If only Clete hadn’t taken his Cadillac Eldorado to his old friend Eddy Durbin’s car wash, things would have been fine, or at least no worse than usual. Instead, he looks out his window and sees a trio of lowlifes who’ve broken into the car, dismantling its doors, clearly in a futile search for drugs they think have been stashed there under the aegis of Andy Durbin, Eddy’s kid brother. As Clete worries about the return of the wrecking crew, and especially of sneering antisemite Baylor Hemmings, a rising star in the New Rising militia, other complications pop up. Clara Bow, Clete’s neighbor, wants him to dig up evidence that will undermine her estranged husband Lauren Bow’s lawsuit against her over the Ponzi scheme they ran, then launches a production of the film Flags on the Bayou, which will sound awfully familiar to Burke’s fans. Winston “Sperm-O” Sellers, the Biloxi bondsman whom pole dancer Gracie Lamar kicked in the mouth when he grabbed at her ankle, is killed. So are ex-KKK auto mechanic Hap Armstrong and Eddy Durbin. Clete’s fight to the death with a heavily tattooed member of the wrecking crew climaxes with his vision of Joan of Arc, who seems to have killed Ink Man with a sniper rifle. The continuing presence of Joan deepens and blurs Clete’s hard-headed first-person voice, making it more and more like the ruminative voice of his old friend Dave Robicheaux, the franchise lead who gracefully settles into a supporting role here.
Devils and saints wrestle in the mud of bayou country.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9780802163073
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.
Unbeknownst to each other, Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett and outlaw falconer Nate Romanowski embark on equally urgent pursuits that converge in a way neither of them suspects.
Nate, who’s been off the grid ever since his wife, Liv, was killed in a fire intended to kill him too in Three-Inch Teeth (2024), has sworn vengeance on murderous conspirator Axel Soledad. After shooting several of Soledad’s hirelings, he joins forces with his friend and fellow Special Forces vet Geronimo Jones, who’s tracked him down, to chase his quarry deep into the woods. Governor Spencer Rulon, meanwhile, has pressed Joe into service once again to find veteran hunting guide Spike Rankin and his new assistant, Mark Eisele, who just happens to be Rulon’s son-in-law. Although nobody’s heard from the men for two days, the governor doesn’t want his wife and daughter to know they’re missing, and that means not alerting the media or the local sheriff, who’s no fan of Rulon’s anyway. Readers who’ve already seen Rankin and Eisele overpowered and imprisoned by a mysterious crew they ran into while they were setting up for the elk hunting season will assume that Soledad is behind their kidnapping as well. But Box will keep everyone guessing about exactly how Soledad and the ragtag military cult he’s gathered around him plan to confront the military-industrial complex he’s persuaded them is a clear and present danger. You know you’re in for a wild ride when Joe, saying goodbye to Marybeth, his long-suffering wife, promises her, “I’ll do my job and not cross the line.”
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593851050
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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