New Iberia Lt. Dave Robicheaux (A Stained White Radiance, 1992, etc.) is trying to link the murder of a local hooker to New Orleans mobster Julie (Baby Feet) Balboni—back in his home parish as co- producer of Hollywood director Michael Goldman's Civil War film—when sozzled/psychic movie-star Elrod Sykes, pulled over for drunk driving, starts babbling about a corpse he found in the Atchafalaya Swamp—the corpse of a black man Dave had seen murdered 35 years before. Convinced that Baby Feet is the key to both the old murder and the horrific new serial killings of prostitutes, Dave goes outside the law to nail him over the protests of locals getting fat off Hollywood-and- mob money—provoking stunning new outbursts of violence, getting suspended after a shootout leaves still another prostitute dead, and finding himself holding hushed conversations with the specter of a Confederate general whom Sykes had already met deep in the bayou. Dave's visions of the Confederate dead bring a Faulknerian resonance to the miasmal guilt and self-doubt that enrich all his encounters with evil. After outstanding success in the genre, Burke has produced a violent, somber, deeply satisfying crossover novel.
Pub Date: April 15, 1993
ISBN: 1-56282-882-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
Back in high school, sexy Joe Morelli relieved Stephanie Plum (among many others) of her virginity; the next time she ran into him, it was with a Buick. Now that she's gone to work as a skiptracer for her scuzzball cousin, a bail bondsman, Stephanie's already counting the $10,000 she'll get for bringing in Trenton, NJ, vice cop Joe Morelli (who survived the Buick encounter), wanted for the murder of an unarmed man. Stephanie, who's new to this kind of work, starts by dropping around Joe's place, and there he is — in the first of half a dozen encounters that always end with her not shooting or cuffing him (though he does get to use her cuffs on her) and not getting that bounty. Joe insists that Ziggy Kulesza, the guy he shot, had first drawn on him and that witnesses will back up his story — naturally, he can't produce Ziggy's gun or those witnesses just yet. In the meantime, Stephanie's crossed swords with Ziggy's employer, testosterone-rich, morals-poor heavyweight champ Benito Ramirez, who's stalking her as she stalks Joe. Stephanie strikes a deal with Joe: She'll dig up the witness who'll exonerate him, then turn him in with his full cooperation and claim the reward. If only she can find the last missing witness before he's beyond subpoena. A smartly paced debut with an irresistible heroine who, despite trouble getting her man, will have readers hooked by page three. Trenton is about to become the comic mystery's most improbable hot spot.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-684-19639-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
A quick, fun read. Rowling delivers a set of characters every bit as durable as her Potter people and a story that, though...
Murderous muggles are up to no good, and it’s up to a seemingly unlikely hero to set things right.
The big news surrounding this pleasing procedural is that Galbraith, reputed former military policeman and security expert, is none other than J.K. Rowling, who presumably has no experience on the Afghan front or at Scotland Yard. Why the pseudonymous subterfuge? We may never know. What’s clear, and what matters, is that Galbraith/Rowling’s yarn is an expertly written exercise in both crime and social criticism of a piece with Rowling’s grown-up novel The Casual Vacancy (2012), even if her hero, private detective Cormoran Strike, bears a name that wouldn’t be out of place in her Harry Potter series. Strike is a hard-drinking, hard-bitten, lonely mess of a man, for reasons that Rowling reveals bit by bit, carefully revealing the secrets he keeps about his parentage, his time in battle and his bad luck. Strike is no Sherlock Holmes, but he’s a dogged pursuer of The Truth, in this instance the identity of the person who may or may not have relieved a supermodel of her existence most unpleasantly: “Her head had bled a little into the snow. The face was crushed and swollen, one eye reduced to a pucker, the other showing as a sliver of dull white between distended lids.” It’s an icky image, but no ickier than Rowling’s roundup of sinister, self-serving, sycophantic characters who inhabit the world of high fashion, among the most suspicious of them a fellow who’s—well, changed his name to pull something over on his audience (“It’s a long fucking way from Hackney, I can tell you...”). Helping Strike along as he turns over stones in the yards of the rich and famous is the eminently helpful Robin Ellacott, newcomer to London and determined to do better than work as a mere temp, which is what lands her at Strike’s door. The trope of rumpled detective and resourceful girl Friday is an old one, of course, but Rowling dusts it off and makes it new even as she turns London into a setting for her tale of mayhem as memorable as what Dashiell Hammett did with San Francisco in The Maltese Falcon.
A quick, fun read. Rowling delivers a set of characters every bit as durable as her Potter people and a story that, though no more complex than an Inspector Lewis episode, works well on every level.Pub Date: April 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-20684-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2013
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