Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux Series #9) » (Reprint)

James Lee Burke was struggling through some lean times as a novelist -- he had published only one book in 15 years -- when a friend and fellow writer suggested he take a stab at crime fiction. The result was The Neon Rain, the first book in his successful Dave Robicheaux books. With a complex moral protagonist and a lush writing style, the series evokes the heady environment of the Louisiana bayou country.

To the people of New Iberia, Aaron Crown's ways are the stuff of "poor white piney-woods folklore." His family were shiftless timber people from north Louisiana who brought their ways into the Cajun wetlands: poaching deer, stealing livestock, trailing rumors of ties to the Ku Klux Klan. No one was surprised when Crown was accused of assassinating the most famous black civil rights leader in Louisiana. But it took twenty-eight years for the system to put him in Angola Penitentiary. Now, Crown is proclaiming his innocence - and asking Dave Robicheaux for help. Dave tries to stay removed from the political maelstrom swirling around Aaron Crown, but deep in his heart he worries that Crown has been made a scapegoat for the collective guilt of an entire generation. But when Buford LaRose - scion of an old Southern family and author of a book that sent Crown to prison - is elected governor, Dave Robicheaux's involvement with the case deepens to a level that threatens to overwhelm him. LaRose's wife, Karyn, is a social-climbing politician's wife, but years ago she and Dave were romantically involved. Now, when she once again turns her seductive powers on Dave, and her husband offers him a job as head of the state police, Dave knows that, somehow, he must find out the truth about Aaron Crown: a truth that too many people want hidden.

Elizabeth Pincus

A prince of the non sequitur, crime novelist James Lee Burke weaves fragments of dialogue into a poetry of machismo, as if real standup guys can't be bothered with the mundane etiquette of conversation. The effect is one of lucid beauty, a staccato shorthand owing equal debt to Hemingway and Hammett. In Cadillac Jukebox, Burke's quixotic detective Dave Robicheaux is hellbent on retribution, so caution is more expendable than usual. When his superior in the New Iberia Sheriff's Office orders him to Mexico to look up "a priest in some shithole down in the interior," Robicheaux asks, "We have money for this?" The reply: "Bring me a sombrero."

Offsetting such terse interaction is Burke's luxurious prose. Sending Robicheaux on a slow drive through that dead nowhere zone south of the border, Burke writes, "The sun rose higher in an empty cobalt sky. We crossed a flat plain with sloughs and reeds by the roadside and stone mountains razored against the horizon and Indian families who seemed to have walked enormous distances from no visible site in order to beg by the road. . . We passed an abandoned iron works dotted with broken windows, and went through villages where the streets were no more than crushed rock and the doors to all the houses were painted either green or blue."

Like his contemporary Walter Mosley, Burke is invigorating the crime fiction series at a time when many of the genre's heavy hitters -- Grafton, Parker -- have grown lazy and stale. Cadillac Jukebox is Burke's ninth outing with Robicheaux, a survivor of Vietnam, the bottle and more than a few personal tragedies. Here Robicheaux stumbles into a bloody mess involving mobbed-up denizens of the Louisiana bayou, the 30-year-old murder of a cherished civil rights leader, a long-ago betrayal of teenage love and an oily southern liberal with his eye on the governor's office. If Robicheaux's honor is sketched a tad too preciously, at least his interior life is of equal weight to the chaos raining around him. Robicheaux is a moral force as rugged as they come, even or especially when the proverbial quest for justice falls short of its goal. -- Salon