The second of Burke's hot-sauce suspensers featuring Dave Robicheaux, protagonist of The Neon Rain (1987); this one is less frantic, more rooted in a specific (Cajun) culture. Here, Robicheaux has retired as a New Orleans homicide cop to run his own bait and boat-rental business in the Louisiana bayous of his childhood; he is newly (and happily) married to Annie (also out of Neon Rain). Dave has one problem: not alcoholism now (he is on the wagon), but his attraction to that "violent and aberrant world" where he once labored as a "bourbon-scented knight-errant." Opportunity knocks when a small plane carrying both Salvadoran illegals and a narcotics transporter crashes into the Gulf. Four of the passengers drown; the fifth, a little girl he calls Alafair, Dave rescues. She proves a boon to the childless Robicheaux marriage, but Dave's other trophy from the wreckage, an incriminating swizzle-stick wrapper, is a disaster, for it leads him back to the pursuit of lowlifes. Against his better judgment, and ignoring Annie's warning, Dave is soon tangling with drug-importer Bubba Rocque and his emissaries, and Annie is shot to death. Dave starts drinking again, then (implausibly) persuades the sheriff to hire him as detective. Eventually Dave tracks down and shoots Annie's killer to death in an exciting climax above a New Orleans laundry. Then Dave has the satisfaction of arresting the person who probably ordered Annie's execution, the lesbian wife of Bubba Rocque, after she has cut Bubba's throat with a cane knife. Despite careless plotting (constant but unresolved allusions to malfeasance by US Immigration), there is enough colorful action to keep readers turning the pages; but there is also altogether too much introspection by the self-hating, drowning-in-guilt Robicheaux. This talented writer could use a third-person narrator to keep the humorless Robicheaux in his place.
Pub Date: April 1, 1988
ISBN: 0743449193
Page Count: -
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1988
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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