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.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-7868-6082-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”
Once again, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett gets mixed up in a killing whose principal suspect is his old friend Nate Romanowski, whose attempts to live off the grid keep breaking down in a series of felony charges.
If Judge Hewitt hadn’t bent over to pick up a spoon that had fallen from his dinner table, the sniper set up nearly a mile from his house in the gated community of the Eagle Mountain Club would have ended his life. As it was, the victim was Sue Hewitt, leaving the judge alive and free to rail and threaten anyone he suspected of the shooting. Incoming Twelve Sleep County Sheriff Brendan Kapelow’s interest in using the case to promote his political ambitions and the judge’s inability to see further than his nose make them the perfect targets for a frame-up of Nate, who just wants to be left alone in the middle of nowhere to train his falcons and help his bride, Liv Brannon, raise their baby, Kestrel. Nor are the sniper, the sheriff, and the judge Nate’s only enemies. Orlando Panfile has been sent to Wyoming by the Sinaloan drug cartel to avenge the deaths of the four assassins whose careers Nate and Joe ended last time out (Wolf Pack, 2019). So it’s up to Joe, with some timely data from his librarian wife, Marybeth, to hire a lawyer for Nate, make sure he doesn’t bust out of jail before his trial, identify the real sniper, who continues to take an active role in the proceedings, and somehow protect him from a killer who regards Nate’s arrest as an unwelcome complication. That’s quite a tall order for someone who can’t shoot straight, who keeps wrecking his state-issued vehicles, and whose appalling mother-in-law, Missy Vankeuren Hand, has returned from her latest European jaunt to suck up all the oxygen in Twelve Sleep County to hustle some illegal drugs for her cancer-stricken sixth husband. But fans of this outstanding series will know better than to place their money against Joe.
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53823-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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