BURNING ANGEL

Burke's last several novels have shown a deepening fascination with the weight of past history; here, in his ninth Dave Robicheaux adventure (Dixie City Jam, 1994, etc.), a treasure buried by Jean Lafitte joins a telltale set of Vietnam-era dog tags to drag his characters down. Lafitte's gold, rumored to be buried on the Bertrand family's land, has made bad blood between Moleen Bertrand and the Fontenot family, sharecroppers on the land from time immemorial. Bertha Fontenot's legal battles with Bertrand are nothing new to her nephew and niece, Luke and Ruthie Jean, veterans of a war that's already left Bertrand's overseer dead. But Luke and Ruthie Jean have more immediate problems: They're caught in the crossfire between Johnny Carp, reigning head of the Giacano crime family, and Sonny Boy Marsallus, last of the independents. The crossfire heats up when a witness to the murder of Sonny's girlfriend, Della Landry, is kidnapped from the New Iberia prison and executed; and it isn't long before Dave, who starts out working on Della's murder, gets pulled into the current too. First, he gets sidelined from the force for soft-pedaling Sonny's killing of a mystery man threatening Dave's own turf, and then he beats up Johnny Carp in front of his own soldiers and can only wait for the inevitable payback. Meanwhile, he tries to figure out why somebody's left a broken legiron in his car and, on his windowsill, a dog tag from an old buddy missing in Laos for 30 years. As usual, Burke creates matchlessly bedeviled characters and puts them through sharp, original scenes. But the ingredients this time are so familiar—the tormented vet, the moralizing killer, the buried treasure that should've stayed buried, and of course Dave's own barely governable violence—that he seems to be writing almost as formulaically as Dick Francis.