10/16/2023
Burke (Every Cloak Rolled in Blood), best-known for his Edgar-winning Dave Robicheaux mystery series, proves his versatility as a storyteller in this textured collection. The title story revolves around James Broussard, a middle-aged oil and gas engineer in 1942 Louisiana who remains traumatized by his combat duty in WWI France. When Broussard and his young son, Aaron, witness a capsized tanker burning in the Gulf of Mexico, he reports the calamity anonymously without explaining why to Aaron. Later, at a restaurant, two federal agents attempt to intimidate Broussard into keeping silent about the tanker. Instead, he pokes a hornet’s nest by telling the local newspaper. In “The Assault,” a history professor is outraged after police refuse to investigate his daughter’s beating at a bar, which happened while she was drunk. He takes matters into his own hands, and ends up facing a difficult moral choice. Throughout, Burke manages to conjure his characters’ worldview in a few artful brushstrokes (Aaron in the title story dreams about “harbor lights that offer sanctuary from a world that breaks everything in us that is beautiful and good”). These impressive stories establish that Burke doesn’t need a whodunit plot to catch a reader’s attention. Agent: Anne-Lise Spitzer, Philip G. Spitzer Literary. (Jan.)
12/01/2023
Award-winning mystery writer Burke's (Dave Robicheaux series) eight-piece story collection shines, from the atmosphere found while cherry picking in a northwestern Montana orchard to the smell of summer watermelons in the South. Beneath all the vivid scenery of pewter skies and heavy rainstorms, the tales are full of depictions of the great evil and adult cruelty at work in the world, blending ancestry and history with more recent days. In the title story, set in New Iberia, LA, in 1942, a young son on a business trip with his father witnesses the impact of his father's affair. "The Wild Side of Life" explores the "blood for blood" culture at a Southern prison farm. "Strange Cargo" describes how true Southerners, whether soldiers, professors, or sheriffs, still do business, good or bad, by a handshake. These stories, while filled with dark themes, are bright with descriptive natural features, spanning from before the Civil War to more modern times, offering a look into the battlefield history of the South and how it remains alive. VERDICT For Burke's many fans and those who enjoy Southern tales.—Joyce Sparrow
The eight performances here provide depth to the settings of these evocative short stories. Themes of race and class are covered, offering fascinating windows into lives on the fringe. Among the standout moments: Alan Carlson exquisitely conveys the violence and ethical dilemmas a professor faces when his daughter is attacked and the police do nothing. Gary Furlong captures a challenging father-and-son dynamic after they witness a tanker capsize. And Leon Nixon captivates when a professor and son are trapped in a rural town during a road trip. The listening experience may be deliberately disorienting as settings and timelines shift, but the soundscape never loses rhythm or pacing, or breaks its spell. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
2023-10-07
Eight stories, four of them new, continue the author’s career-long project of expanding the mystery genre to include bigger crimes like slavery and deeper mysteries like the nature of evil.
Two prison inmates set up to fight each other in “Big Midnight Special” move toward a finale that’s predictably eerie and violent but by no means inevitable. The romance in “The Wild Side of Life” is poisoned by echoes of racism and family history that doom it without opening the lovers’ troubled memories to new understanding. Aaron Holland Broussard and his grandfather, Hackberry Holland, both of them more than familiar to fans of Burke’s novels, run afoul of federal agents hunting down unauthorized Mexican immigrants in “Deportees,” and Aaron returns years later in “Strange Cargo,” the longest story here, haunted by his daughter’s death and eager to grasp his own from stomach cancer, to tangle with a bigoted sheriff, a prickly Black female detective, and a killer who’s apparently been transported from the past. The best stories are the most sharply focused: “Harbor Lights,” in which Aaron’s father, pressed by the FBI to keep quiet about a deadly German submarine that’s been shockingly close to the Louisiana coast, goes to a newspaper instead and sets off a deadly chain of events; “The Assault,” in which Professor Delbert Hatfield’s attempt to get justice for an attack against his brain-damaged daughter pits him against uncaring cops and neo-Nazis; and “A Distant War,” in which Francis Holland’s car trouble south of Colorado plunges him and his son into an inferno filled with racists, scammers, and a woman who claims she’s Jefferson Davis’ widow.
Burke’s not a polisher bent on perfecting every word but a bard who can’t help returning to each story over and over again.
Praise for Flags on the Bayou:
“The Civil War comes to New Iberia, Louisiana, the capital of Burke’s wondrous fictional empire… [Readers] may well agree that it’s his most probing examination of the enduring legacy of slavery… A grueling, compassionate demonstration that ‘the devil ain’t down in a fiery pit. He’s right here.’”—Kirkus (starred review)
“A stunning work. Man’s addiction to darkness and evil is on horrific display, yet love’s fierce light shines through the poorest of souls. With a belief in God’s grace and redemption, they demand the courage to seek it, against all odds. Often I had to reread a sentence or paragraph, smiling and shaking my head at the power of words assembled that evoke emotional landslides no one creates like James Lee Burke. Get this now. It will take you apart and heal you. Lord, what a magnificent book!”—Nils Lofgren, Member of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band and Member of Neil Young’s Crazy Horse Band
Praise for James Lee Burke:
“James Lee Burke is the reigning champ of nostalgia noir.”—New York Times Book Review
“You can always count on Burke to deliver a white-hot page-turner.”—AARP Magazine
“Burke’s evocative prose remains a thing of reliably fierce wonder.”—Entertainment Weekly
“One of the finest novelists in North America.”—Margaret Cannon, Globe and Mail
“James Lee Burke is one of a small handful of elite suspense writers whose work transcends the genre, making the leap into capital-L Literature.”—Bookpage
