Clete

Another tour de force from one of today’s most iconic writers. Burke returns to his marvelous Dave Robicheaux series, but this time the main character is Dave’s quirky and beloved partner, Clete Purcel. Both grew up together in New Orleans’ Iberia Parish and went off to Vietnam, experiencing horrors that have left images permanently ingrained in their minds, never to be removed.

Clete served two tours in Vietnam and was highly decorated with three Purple Hearts, the Silver Star, and the Navy Cross, but left with a permanent scar in his heart. Both he and Dave have devoted their lives to aiding the disenfranchised, weak, and emotionally scarred. Clete has carried in his wallet for over two decades a photo he tore out of a magazine. It hauntingly shows a Jewish woman walking to the showers of Auschwitz with her three children following. He feels we can never purge the earth of those responsible and their present-day heirs. Burke weaves another epic and tantalizingly complex tale set in Louisiana’s Iberia Parish in the late 1990s.

Clete has just returned home after retrieving his beloved Eldorado Cadillac from Eddy Durbin’s Car Wash. He awakens in the early morning to a racket in his courtyard. Three low-life thugs are tearing apart his car in search of what he suspects are drugs. Did Eddy or his useless brother Andy stash some type of contraband? He ambles downstairs in his bathrobe and pink bunny slippers to confront the situation. One of the idiots actually has a t-shirt that states: “Six Million Was Not Enough.” This alone infuriates Clete. He takes all of them on in a cinematic fight scene, which unfortunately renders him unconscious after a blow to the head with a tire iron. The image of the heavily tattooed man with the crowbar is firmly ingrained in his mind. He quickly learns that the anti-Semitic tattooed man is Baylor Hemmings, a rising star in the New Rising militia group. Burke weaves into his tale a cast of flawed and colorful characters right out of Dante’s Inferno, each more odious and conflicted than the one before. Meanwhile, Clete is approached by the beautiful and mysterious Clara Bow, who wants to hire him to investigate her estranged husband’s shady dealings—not their shared involvement in a major Ponzi scheme, but his possible involvement in drug smuggling. On the street is a new drug laced with a deadly substance that could annihilate civilization. In typical Burke fashion, Clete is intermittently visited by the visage of Joan of Arc, who offers encouragement, advice, and appropriate warnings. She also apparently saves Clete’s life by offing an attacker with a long-range sniper rifle.

James Lee Burke continues to use his usual mesmerizing characters and twisted plot developments in the lush, florid setting of Louisiana. He paints a captivating tale of white slavery, corruption, women and class dominance, and the ever-present escalating drug industry. He provides thought-provoking statements that are relevant now as then. Even with his marvelous and evocative run-on sentences, the mood and imagery of the tale emerge with escalating suspense and tension. Sometimes it’s necessary to study past evils in hopes of dispelling them in the present and future.

Thanks to NetGalley and Atlantic Monthly Press for providing an Uncorrected Proof for my review in exchange for an honest review. Hopefully, Burke is not finished penning these marvelous tales.