Devils and saints wrestle in the mud of bayou country.
Burke returns to Louisiana’s New Iberia Parish and the late 1990s for a tangled tale that confronts private eye Clete Purcel with monsters in the present and spirits from the past.
If only Clete hadn’t taken his Cadillac Eldorado to his old friend Eddy Durbin’s car wash, things would have been fine, or at least no worse than usual. Instead, he looks out his window and sees a trio of lowlifes who’ve broken into the car, dismantling its doors, clearly in a futile search for drugs they think have been stashed there under the aegis of Andy Durbin, Eddy’s kid brother. As Clete worries about the return of the wrecking crew, and especially of sneering antisemite Baylor Hemmings, a rising star in the New Rising militia, other complications pop up. Clara Bow, Clete’s neighbor, wants him to dig up evidence that will undermine her estranged husband Lauren Bow’s lawsuit against her over the Ponzi scheme they ran, then launches a production of the film Flags on the Bayou, which will sound awfully familiar to Burke’s fans. Winston “Sperm-O” Sellers, the Biloxi bondsman whom pole dancer Gracie Lamar kicked in the mouth when he grabbed at her ankle, is killed. So are ex-KKK auto mechanic Hap Armstrong and Eddy Durbin. Clete’s fight to the death with a heavily tattooed member of the wrecking crew climaxes with his vision of Joan of Arc, who seems to have killed Ink Man with a sniper rifle. The continuing presence of Joan deepens and blurs Clete’s hard-headed first-person voice, making it more and more like the ruminative voice of his old friend Dave Robicheaux, the franchise lead who gracefully settles into a supporting role here.
Devils and saints wrestle in the mud of bayou country.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9780802163073
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett has been shot plenty of times before. But this time may be the last.
As Joe hovers between life and death in a Billings hospital, Box indicates that Dorn Peddy and James Dale O’Bryan are the two men who ambushed him, shot him, and left him for dead. But he doesn’t reveal who hired them or why. That’s left up to Joe’s three daughters: bird-abatement firm chief executive Sheridan, Bozeman private eye April, and University of Wyoming undergrad Lucy. Since the man who reported the incident to the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department has disappeared, the most that newly appointed Sheriff Steve Sondergard can do is to warn Sheridan and her sisters away from the case. But the fact that both the shooters and the witness seem to have come from one of exactly three places presents an obvious appeal to the younger Picketts, who plan to each visit one place and question the owners simultaneously before they can warn each other that anyone’s coming. The only problem is that all the possible suspects—billionaire Michael Thompson and his wife, Brandy, of the Double Diamond Ranch; ranchers John and Shelby Bucholz, of the Bucholz Cattle Company; and secretive sisters Lisa and Lainie McElwee, of McElwee Land and Cattle Ranch—act equally guilty. As Box unspools a series of flashbacks showing what Joe was up to in the weeks before the ambush, one question assumes paramount importance: Can Joe’s daughters identify which of them is behind the plot to murder their father before the hired gunmen visit the hospital and try again?
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780593851098
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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