Review by New York Times Review
People can never tell the exact moment their old neighborhood disappears. One day, everybody knows where you came from and where you're going; the next, you don't recognize a soul. VISITATION STREET (Dennis Lehane/ Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99), a powerfully beautiful novel by Ivy Pochoda, lingers on the moment the working-class neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn, changed forever: the night 15-year-old June Giatto went out into the Upper Bay in a pink raft with her best friend, Val Marino, and never returned. Nothing was the same after that: developers discovered the historic waterfront, initiating a gentrification that was swift and unstoppable. Even the longshoremen's bars had their history "buffed and polished away." But on the night June disappeared, families still lived in the shabby row houses and worked at blue-collar jobs while their children dreamed of sailing away on a pink raft. A violent death can do that, mark the instant when people suddenly notice the ground has shifted. Pochoda picks her moment well and lets people from the neighborhood - diverse characters who are vibrantly, insistently alive - tell the story. Val is the one you want to protect. She's smart and sensible, but so crushed with guilt over June's death that she's easy bait for the sharks that swim in these streets. Cree James, a kid from the projects who gave Val her first kiss, is also vulnerable because he was seen on the pier, which was enough for the police to question him. Jonathan Sprouse, the high school music teacher who pulled Val from the bay, feels so protective he's now stalking her. Meanwhile, the graffiti artist known as RunDown slips unnoticed through the streets of the waterfront, finding beauty as well as danger. Then there are the dead people who come up from the cracks, their voices heard only by a few women with the gift. They're all part of the neighborhood portrait Pochoda pieces together from the detritus, sharing her vision with a favorite character like Cree, who gradually "becomes aware of the layers that form the Hook - the projects built over the frame houses, the pavement laid over the cobblestones, . . . the living walking on top of the dead - the waterfront dead, the old mob dead, the drug war dead - everyone still there. A neighborhood of ghosts. It's not such a bad place." Over the years, James Lee Burke's voice has grown more messianic, his books more biblical. He's in full fire-and-brimstone mode in LIGHT OF THE WORLD (Simon & Schuster, $27.99), the 20th novel in a series featuring Dave Robicheaux, a Louisiana sheriff's detective and onetime alcoholic brawler whose struggles with his own demons set the fiery tone (and high body count) of these modern morality tales. Robicheaux and posse (wife, daughter and best buddy) are on a friend's ranch in western Montana, where, for reasons that would make sense only to another sociopath, a savage killer named Asa Surrette has tracked them down and delivered an especially gruesome murder as his calling card. Robicheaux, who maintains a superstitious belief in tangible evil that can be overcome by earthly men of honor, swears Surrette is the devil incarnate, citing his abominable sulfuric odor as proof. "He's not a mythological figure," a more pragmatic gunslinger points out. "He's a serial killer from Kansas." Demon or not, Surrette is a monstrous villain, and he makes life a living hell for an expanded cast of the quaintly insane characters who are Burke's specialty. For that alone, let's give this devil his due. Bill James's urbanely amusing Harpur and Iles novels, about high-placed British coppers who work together while hating each other's guts, have come to feel like lethal entries in the Child's Garden of Evil Jokes. PLAY DEAD (Crème de la Crime, $28.95), the 30th book in this cunning series, finds Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur subtly undermining the fastidious efforts of his superior, Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles, to revisit an unfinished case of police corruption. The longer the case drags on, the more foul-tempered Iles becomes, until he inevitably brings up Harpur's ill-advised affair with his wife. Speaking in a voice that is "wonderfully mild, conversational and dangerous," Iles repeatedly flays Harpur in public for consorting with her "in fourth-rate rooming joints, under evergreen hedgerows, in marly fields, on river banks, in cars" and so forth. Harpur's infuriating response is to open up some opaque line of dialogue that has them talking at cross-purposes until they come to blows. It's amazing how much venom goes into the friendly banter of sworn enemies. As chief of police of St. Denis, a picturesque village in the valley of the Dordogne, Bruno Courrèges is unprepared for the sensational case that occupies him in THE DEVIL'S CAVE (Knopf, $24.95). In Martin Walker's latest novel set in "the gastronomic and sporting heartland of France," the naked body of a woman with a pentagram on her torso comes floating down the Vézère River in a small boat. That bizarre event, along with the ritual trappings of a Black Mass found in one of the region's prehistoric limestone caves, is enough to put St. Denis on the map as a hotbed of devil worship. As one local entrepreneur observes, "This Satan stuff is good for business." But while the swell of tourists ruffles the tranquillity of the town, it also gives Walker more opportunity to play tour guide, leading us through the checkered history of this astonishing region. In the Red Hook neighborhood where Ivy Pochoda sets her novel, the living walk 'on top of the dead.'
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 21, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Hats off to the Library of Congress cataloger who applied the subject heading Good and Evil to Burke's latest Dave Robicheaux novel. In that simple tag lies the core of this acclaimed series. Robicheaux, the Cajun detective with a melancholy streak as wide as the Mississippi, grieves lost innocence in all its forms, but as much as he remembers goodness in the past, he crusades against evil in the present. The bad guys against whom Robicheaux along with his equally tormented comrade-in-arms, Clete Purcell campaigns sometimes take the form of bent rich guys driven by blind greed. But occasionally the evil comes in a more chilling, vaguely supernatural form depravity beyond sociology giving these novels a darker, more mythic tone, with Robicheaux cast as a contemporary Beowulf, asked to plunge deep into the heart of darkness to confront the Grendels lurking beneath the surface of daily life. So it is here, when serial killer Asa Surette, believed dead, resurfaces in Montana with scores to settle, including one with Robicheaux's daughter, Alafair. The plot plays out in a manner that will be familiar to Burke fans, including a firestorm of a climax near Flathead Lake, but there is one big difference: no longer is it just Dave and Clete sallying forth, armed to the teeth, to slay the monster. No, this time it's a family affair, with the next generation Alafair and Clete's daughter, Gretchen, who surfaced in Creole Belle (2012) also locked, loaded, and standing alongside their fathers in the final confrontation. It sounds over the top, but it works, enveloping the reader in the visceral terror of the moment and reminding us that Grendel may still swim in our midst. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Burke has won two Edgars and been named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America; his Dave Robicheaux novels routinely lodge themselves on the New York Times bestseller list. This one will, too.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Bestseller Burke's 20th Dave Robicheaux novel (after 2012's Creole Belle), a powerful meditation on the nature-and smell-of evil, finds the Louisiana sheriff's detective on vacation in Montana with family and friends. There they are hounded and haunted by a psychopathic serial killer, Asa Surrette, believed to have been killed in a prison van accident. Surrette has a fate worse than death in mind for Robicheaux's journalist daughter, who interviewed him in prison. Meanwhile, his friend's daughter, one of the most damaged women in detective fiction, is working on a documentary on shale oil extraction, earning her some powerful enemies. This book could easily have been subtitled "Daddies, Don't Bring Your Daughters to Montana," as people don't just get killed: they're tortured, disfigured, and eviscerated. Robicheaux himself remains haunted by his experiences in Vietnam. But even as the stomach roils, the fingers keep turning the pages because the much-honored Burke (two Edgars, a Guggenheim Fellowship) is a master storyteller. Agent: Philip Spitzer, Philip G. Spitzer Literary Agency. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcel are back in Burke's (Creole Belle) newest book, this time at a friend's ranch in Montana. Listeners may miss the environs of New Iberia, but the qualities that made Burke's other books a favorite are still here, especially the battle among good, evil, and more evil with the presence of Asa Surrette, a demonic and seemingly indestructible serial killer. Minimal help from local police puts both Dave's and Clete's daughters in danger, but the female characters are strong and resourceful. Will Patton does another excellent reading of Burke's suspenseful yet reflective thriller. His voice clearly differentiates among the characters with a tone that adds to the listener's perception of each personality. VERDICT Highly recommended for fans of Burke and of mystery/thrillers set in the American West.-Deb West, Gannon Univ. Lib., Erie, PA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Dave Robicheaux's latest Montana vacation is beset by demons old and new. It's a long way from New Iberia, La., to Big Sky country, but some things never change, like the constant threat of violence from unknown quarters. Or not so unknown, since Dave's adopted daughter, Alafair, is sure that psycho rodeo cowboy Wyatt Dixon (In the Moon of Red Ponies, 2004, etc.) is the man who shot an arrow at her head. But Dave's not so sure: A growing pile of evidence suggests that the archer was Asa Surrette, the mass murderer Alafair interviewed years ago in a Kansas prison for a true-crime book she gave up writing in horrified disgust. Surrette, reported dead in a flaming car crash, gives every indication of being alive, active and as malevolent as ever. That spells major trouble for Dave, who's staying with novelist/teacher Albert Hollister; his old buddy Clete Purcel, who's falling for Felicity Louviere, the unhappy wife of Caspian Younger, whose fabulously wealthy daddy, Love, has a summer place nearby; Gretchen Horowitz, the contract killer last seen executing her gangster father in Creole Belle (2012); and of course Alafair, the ultimate target of Surrette's sadistic wrath. Series regulars will find no immunity from physical or spiritual maiming at the hands of Missoula County Sheriff's Deputy Bill Pepper, his replacement, Jack Boyd, or younger hireling Kyle Schumacher. Instead of simply absorbing threats and punishment, however, the good guys dish them out with a single-minded intensity that comes back to haunt them during the many reflective moments when they wonder what really separates them from the bad guys after all. Pruning away the florid subplots that often clutter his heaven-storming blood baths, Burke produces his most sharply focused, and perhaps his most harrowing, study of human evil, refracted through the conventions of the crime novel.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
