Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux Series #7) » (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.

The search for a forgotten Nazi submarine sunk off the coast of New Orleans stirs up old hatreds submerged for just as long, in a brilliant new book by Edgar Award winner James Lee Burke. With Dixie City Jam, the writer USA Today called "the Grisham Alternative" enters the front ranks of contemporary fiction writers . . . and mainstream bestsellers. They're out there, under the salt - the bodies of German seamen who used to lie in wait at the mouth of the Mississippi for unescorted American tankers sailing from the oil refineries of Baton Rouge out into the Gulf of Mexico. As a child, Dave Robicheaux had been haunted by the sailors' images; then, as a young college student, he'd accidentally discovered one of their subs while scuba diving. Years later, in a New Orleans populated by desperate hustlers and millennium-watchers of all stripes, Robicheaux, a detective with the New Iberia sheriff's office, finds himself and his family at serious risk, stalked for his knowledge of a watery burial ground by a mysterious man named Will Buchalter - a man who believes that the Holocaust was one big hoax. American crime fiction's "finest prose stylist" (Los Angeles Times) is at the peak of his powers in Dixie City Jam as he looks long and deep into the human heart of darkness.

Publishers Weekly

After his dreamy sojourn into Civil War history in In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead , former New Orleans cop Dave Robicheaux comes up against the residue of Nazism in his action-packed, somewhat rambling seventh adventure. When Batist, who helps Dave run his bait shop, is arrested for the latest in a series of murders of New Orleans drug dealers, Dave must raise money for his bail. For a $10,000 finder's fee, he agrees to search for a Nazi submarine sunk in 1942 off the coast of New Iberia, where he is now deputy sheriff. While the sub search draws the attention of a neo-Nazi sadist who threatens Dave's wife, Bootsie, Dave is distracted by the antics of his former partner, Clete Purcel, who has decided to take on mob interests and, in one instance, destroys a crime boss's mansion with an earth mover. Before a dramatic resolution at sea draws the threads of the plots loosely together, Dave traces an intricate course marked by ritual killings, bouts of torture, Bootsie's anxiety (from which she seeks relief in drink) and racial and gender politics within the New Orleans police force, drawing Dave into the lives of a feisty black woman cop and her teenage son. A standout in the diverting supporting cast is doom-predicting Brother Oswald, who employs a maddeningly roundabout manner of discourse. In this physically demanding, fast moving plot, Dave is less ruminative than when last seen, though he holds on to his trademark melancholy-tinged sensitivity. $200,000 ad/promo; 20-city author tour.