The Tin Roof Blowdown (Robicheaux, Book 16) (Dave Robicheaux)

The great novelist Ed McBain once told me that every mystery needs a corpse in the first few pages or somebody about to become a corpse. In THE TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN, James Lee Burke put his corpse on page 2. His longtime protagonist, New Iberia detective Dave Robicheaux, awakens from a nightmare about his days in Vietnam. Robicheaux says, "When I go back to sleep, I once again tell myself I will never again have to witness the wide-scale suffering of innocent civilians, nor the betrayal and abandonment of our countrymen when they need us most. "But that was before Katrina. That was before a storm with greater impact than the bomb blast that struck Hiroshima peeled the face off southern Louisiana. That was before one of the most beautiful cities in the Western Hemisphere was killed three times, and not just by the forces of nature." Art reflects the world and time in which it is created. At its greatest, art can tell the truth about suffering and dying in a way that journalism never can. Think of Picasso's Guernica. No American novelist is more closely associated with New Orleans than James Lee Burke. THE TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN is one of his greatest, darkest works. He has managed to build a gripping suspense story around one of America's worst moments and take readers on a harrowing journey into the heart of the country's darkness. The Robicheaux stories have always been an elegy to the lost world of South Louisiana. Those were the days, Burke writes, of "duck-hunting dawns and summer-afternoon crab boils in a shady pavilion and college dances on Spanish Lake under oak trees that were strung with Japanese lanterns." One of the most fascinating features of this series is the highly damaged character of Robicheaux that Burke has created over the past 20 years. Robicheaux is a recovering alcoholic struggling to stay sober, a man who has seen too much of the darkness and is angst-ridden and haunted by it. Yet he is a good man, constantly seeking redemption. As his wife and ex-nun, Molly, says at one point in this book: "You take on other people's suffering without their ever asking. Your greatest virtue is your greatest weakness." Here, he will be tested as never before. "It was a season of death," Burke writes. The novel starts with Robicheaux concerned about a childhood friend, a dying, junkie priest named Jude LeBlanc. Father LeBlanc sets off on a suicide redemption mission of his own, commandeering a boat and trying, armed only with an ax, to rescue people trapped in a church attic as the water rises in the Lower Ninth Ward. That is the last anybody sees of the priest; the people in the attic all drowned. Later, uptown, four young looters sail into a rich neighborhood on a boat. It just so happens they chose a fateful street. On one side lives a man, Otis Baylor, whose teenage daughter was brutally gang-raped by men fitting the description of the looters. They were never caught by the police. Otis owns a high-powered sniper rifle. Soon, one loote

I think that James Lee Burke outdid himself with his latest Dave Robicheaux mystery, The Tin Roof Blowdown. Burke has often used the backdrop of New Orleans for his often dark and tortured books. But no fictional event could have provided as much material as Hurricane Katrina did in 2005. Dave Robicheaux is a detective with the New Iberia Sheriff's Department, outside of New Orleans. When Katrina hits the Crescent City, all outside law enforcement agencies sent available officers to aid with the chaos that resulted. Robicheaux spent time in Viet Nam, but nothing he saw in war could have prepared him for what he witnessed in New Orleans. When he left Nam, he thought he would "never again have to witness the wide-scale suffering of innocent civilians, nor the betrayal and abandonment of our countrymen when they need us the most. But that was before Katrina. That was before a storm with greater impact than the bomb blast that struck Hiroshima peeled the face off southern Louisiana." In The Tin Roof Blowdown, bounty hunter and Robicheaux friend, Cletus Purcel, is trying to pick up some bail skips right before Katrina hits. But the same men that Purcel is after end up being wanted for a host of other crimes as well. Not only that, but they've stolen a fortune from the top Mafioso in New Orleans. So not only are the cops looking for them, but some unsavory characters are as well. How these characters all converge is vintage Burke. One of the things I like best about Burke's books is that he makes the locale a major player in his stories. He has a love/hate relationship with New Orleans and calls her the Whore of Babylon. When driving through the ruined streets, he muses "New Orleans had been a song, not a city. Like San Francisco, it didn't belong to a state; it belonged to a people." He describes southern Louisiana with lush brushstrokes, from the bayous to the wildlife to the marshes. But where he outdoes himself in The Tin Roof Blowdown is in his descriptions of post-Katrina New Orleans. No pictures that you may have seen will accurately tell the story of what happened to this historic city as well as Burke does in narrative form. It is that vivid and that horrible. James Lee Burke tends to publish a new Robicheaux every July. Fortunately for us, while prolific in his writing, he isn't publishing books just to meet a deadline. The Tin Roof Blowdown is the real deal.

Tin Roof Blowdown, makes what happened in New Orleans more real to me than even the live television broadcasts. Mr. Burke has outdone himself on this one. I don't like the word "fan", but I must admit I have been a fan of Mr. Burke's novels for a long time. Mr. Burke has taken the characters of this novel, and made them the real people we saw on tv during Katrina and Rita. Mr. Burke went where the media could not go...into the minds of the victims, the criminals, and the innocents, who were part of this travesty against humanity. Thank you, Mr. Burke, for not letting the world forget! Venitra Clark Elmira NY

This is the most horrifying description of post Katrina that I've read to date. Burke's lush descriptions of the beauty of New Orleans and Louisiana bayou country are gone, replaced by "bodies wrapped tight like mummies in the gray and brown detritus left by the receding waters." There were parts I had to close my eyes to listen to because the sense of place was so vivid and I couldn't stand what I was seeing. There were times I found tears rolling down my face without notice. The story is vintage Burke with a little bit of "is it mystical magic or not" thrown in amongst the good vs. evil that is the cross on which Burke hangs his stories. Burke's politics is more evident here than in other books, with Bush bashing, gratuitous remarks about Fox News, etc., jarringly interrupting the story's magic. But yet, the depth of Burke's anger at what happened in New Orleans, the failures and abandoment, certainly is well-grounded, and he vents that anger for all to see. You can read the publisher's summary to get a feel for the story, but even if Burke was writing about the recipe for a fish stew, I'd read it and it would be wonderful. There is not a writer alive today that can put you in the scene so completely - the smells, the sights, the scent of the breeze, the color of sunlight and shade, the fragility of a human soul and its wounds...he's just amazing. This is a wonderful, achingly sad, and horrific story of how Burke mourns the City of New Orleans and what it once was. Dave and Clete have lost their anchor and their childhoods. I'd give it 10 stars if possible.

Burke is the best around and he proves it again in the 16th Detective Robicheaux novel. He is able to capture the spirit of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast while telling a captivating story, and also illustrate much of what went wrong in our response to Hurricane Katrina--but he also shows what the human spirit can over come. Robicheaux's is investigating the shooting of one of two looters after they had looted the home of one of the city's most powerful mobsters. He Must find the surviving looter before the mobsters goons can get him. At the same time he is looking into the disappearance of a Ninth Ward priest who vanished while trying to save members of his congregation who were trapped by the hurricane flood waters. Burke is able to straddle the line between good and evil with each of his characters in such a way that the outcome is not foreseen and the gray areas are real. In the end though, the human spirit always shines through!