Burning Angel (Dave Robicheaux Series #8)

by James Lee Burke Narrated by Will Patton

Overview

A BRUTAL LEGACY OF CRUELTY AND HATE IS AWAKENED IN THE BAYOU

When Sonny Boy Marsallus returns to New Iberia after fleeing
for Central America to avoid the wrath of the powerful Giacana
family, his old troubles soon follow. Meanwhile Dave
Robicheaux becomes entangled in the affairs of the Fontenot
family, descendants of sharecroppers whose matriarch helped
raise Dave as a child. They are in danger of losing the land
they've lived on for more than a century.

As Dave tries to discover who wants the land so badly, he finds
himself in increasing peril from a lethal, rag tag alliance of
local mobsters and a hired assassin with a shady past. And
when a seemingly innocent woman is brutally murdered, all
roads intersect, and Sonny Boy is in the middle.

With the usual James Lee Burke combination of brilliant
action and unforgettable characters, Burning Angel is
the author at his best -- showing that old hatreds and new
ones are not that far apart.

Editorial Reviews

San Jose Mercury News

Pulsating Adventure.

Detroit Free Press

Wonderful writing...Don't miss this book. It's one of the years best.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Burke pits a land-hungry oil company against a Blackfeet Indian reservation in a stunning novel that takes detective fiction into new imaginative realms. His Cajun sleuth, Dave Robicheaux, an ex-New Orleans cop featured in two previous novels, attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, has recurrent nightmares about his murdered wife, and cares for an adopted El Salvadoran refugee girl. When two American Indian activists disappear, Robicheaux's dogged investigation not only sets him on a collision course with Mafia thugs and oil interests, but also leads him into a romance with Darlene American Horse, his ex-partner's girlfriend. All the main characters in this darkly beautiful, lyric saga carry heavy emotional baggage, and Robicheaux's sleuthing is a simultaneous exorcism of demons of grief, loss, fear, rage, vengeance. Burke's fictional terrain--stretching from the Louisiana bayous to Montana's red cliffs and pine-dotted hills--is uniquely his own, yet also a microcosm of a multi-ethnic America. He writes from the heart and the gut. 35,000 first printing; major ad/promo. (Sept.)

Library Journal

Burke brings back Dave Robicheaux in this gripping sequel to Heaven's Prisoners ( LJ 4/1/88). Dave, a former homicide cop, is trying to run his fishing business, care for six-year-old-orphan Alafair, and come to terms with the violent death of his wife, Annie. A chance encounter with an old friend haunted by a troubling secret sets off a chain of events that leaves Dave framed for murder. Desperate to prove his innocence and protect Alafair, Robicheaux is forced to conduct his own investigation. Robicheaux is a complex and very believable character, battling alcoholism, haunted by his wife's death, struggling to hold onto his Catholic faith. Surrounded by violence, he is a man of integrity trying to find an honorable way out. As such he should appeal to fans of Travis McGee and readers of well-crafted suspense. Skillfully evoked settings add to the book's appeal. Highly recommended.-- Beth Ann Mills, New Rochelle P.L., N.Y.

Jonathan Yardley

Burke is off on a chase that is at once engrossing and...convincing. -- Washington Post

Lewis Beale

Burke's writing crackles with style and authority. -- New York Daily News

From the Publisher

"A passionate, exciting addition to the series that has set new standards in the genre."—Chicago Tribune

"At once engrossing and ... convincing."—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post

Chicago Tribune

"A passionate, exciting addition to the series that has set new standards in the genre."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171524753
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	09/01/1995
Series:	Dave Robicheaux Series , #8
Edition description:	Abridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

HER hair is curly and gold on the pillow, her skin white in the heat lightning that trembles beyond the pecan trees outside the bedroom window. The night is hot and breathless, the clouds painted like horsetails against the sky; a peal of thunder rumbles out an the Gulf like an apple rolling around in the bottom of a wood barrel, and the first raindrops ping against the window fan. She sleeps on her side, and the sheet molds her thigh, the curve of her hip, her breast. In the flicker of the heat lightning the sun freckles on her bare shoulder look like brown flaws in sculpted marble.

Then a prizing bar splinters the front door out of the jamb, and two men burst inside the house in heavy shoes, their pump shotguns at port arms. One is a tall Haitian, the other a Latin whose hair hangs off his head in oiled ringlets. They stand at the foot of the double bed in which she sleeps alone, and do not speak. She awakes with her mouth open, her eyes wide and empty of meaning. Her face is still warm from a dream, and she cannot separate sleep from the two men who stare at her without speaking. Then she sees them looking at each other and aim their shotguns point-blank at her chest. Her eyes film and she calls out my name like a wet bubble bursting in her throat. The sheet is twisted in her hands; she holds it against her breasts as though it could protect her from twelve-gauge deer slugs and double-aught buckshot.

They begin shooting, and the room seems to explode with smoke and flame from their shotgun barrels, with shell wadding, mattress stuffing, splinters gouged out of the bedstead, torn lampshades, flying glass. The two killers aremethodical. They have taken out the sportsman's plug in their shotguns so they can load five rounds in the magazine, and they keep firing and ejecting the smoking hulls an the floor until their firing pins snap empty. Then they reload with the calmness of men who might have juststood up in a blind and fired at a formation of ducks overhead.

The sheet is torn, drenched with her blood, embedded in her wounds. The men have gone now, and I sink to my, knees by my wife and kiss her sightless eyes, run my hands over her hair and wan face, put her fingers in my mouth. A solitary drop of her blood runs down the shattered headboard and pools on my skin. A bolt of lightning explodes in an empty field behind the house. The inside of my head is filled with a wet, sulphurous smell, and again I hear my name rise like muffled, trapped air released from the sandy bottom of a pond.

It was four in the morning on a Saturday and raining hard when I awoke from the dream in a West Baton Rouge motel. I sat on the side of the bed in my underwear and tried to rub the dream out of my face, then I used the bathroom and came back and sat on the side ofthe bed again in the dark.

First light was still two hours away, but I knew I would not sleep again. I put on my raincoat and hat and drove in my pickup truck to an all-night café that occupied one side of a clapboard roadhouse. The rain clattered on my truck cab, and the wind was blowing strong Out of the southwest, across the Atchafalaya swamp, whipping the palm and Oak trees by the highway. West Baton Rouge, which begins at the Mississippi River, has always been a seedy area of truck stops, marginal gambling joints, Negro and blue-collar bars. To the east you can see the lighted girders of the Earl K. Long Bridge, plumes of smoke rising from the oil refineries, the state capitol building silhouetted in the rain. Baton Rouge is a green town full of oak trees, parks, and lakes, and the thousands of lights on the refineries and chemical plants are regarded as a testimony to financial security rather than a sign of industrial blight. But once you drive west across the metal grid of the bridge and thump down on the old cracked four-lane, you're in a world that caters to the people of the Atchafalaya basin -- Cajuns, redbones, roustabouts, pipeliners, rednecks whose shrinking piece of American geography is identified only by a battered pickup, a tape deck playing Waylon, and a twelve-pack of Jax.

The rain spun in the yellow arc lights over the café parking lot. It was empty inside, except for a fat Negro woman whom I could see through the service window in the kitchen, and a pretty, redheaded waitress in her early twenties, dressed in a pink uniform with her hair tied up on her freckled neck. She was obviously tired, but she was polite and smiled at me when she took my order, and I felt a sense of guilt, almost shame, at my susceptibility and easy fondness for a young woman's smile. Because if you're forty-nine and unmarried or a widower or if you've simply chosen to live alone, you're easily flattered by a young woman's seeming attention to you, and you forget that it is often simply a deference to your age.

I ordered a chicken-fried steak and a cup of coffee and listened to Jimmy Clanton's recording of "Just a Dream" that came from the jukebox next door. Through the open doorway that gave onto the empty dance floor, I could see a half-dozen people at the bar against the far wall. I watched a man my age, with waved blond hair, drink his

I whiskey down to the ice, point to the glass for the bartender to refill it, then rise from...

Videos