As usual, fans of this distinguished series will have a lot more sympathy for Dave (Crusader’s Cross, 2005, etc.) than he...
Twenty-five years after he failed to save a buddy’s life in Opa-Locka, Fla., New Iberia Sheriff’s Deputy Dave Robicheaux’s own life is upended still again when the buddy’s daughter blows into town.
Bookie Whitey Bruxal respected Dallas Klein’s heroism in Vietnam, but business was business. So he sent some collectors after the debtor, and when the alcoholic fog had cleared from Dave’s eyes, his friend was dead—because, he’s always believed, he couldn’t help him. Now Whitey is a major player in Louisiana’s casinos and the daughter Dallas left behind a stunning young woman who arrives in New Iberia with a couple of marked $100 bills in her wallet and an inscrutable yearning for the company of private eye Clete Purcel, Dave’s closest friend. Dave wants to know Trish Klein’s motive for her interest in Clete. But first he’ll have to focus on the death of Yvonne Darbonne, a virginal college-bound waitress who spent the last hours of her life overdosing on drink, drugs and sex before getting shot in the face. Both plots are only preliminaries to the main event: Dave’s doomed attempt to referee a high-stakes war involving the Bruxal family; Tony Lujan, Yvonne’s authorized lover and the friend of Whitey’s son Slim; and everyone else in New Iberia.
As usual, fans of this distinguished series will have a lot more sympathy for Dave (Crusader’s Cross, 2005, etc.) than he can muster for himself.Pub Date: July 11, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-7772-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on...
After five adventures for Boston shamus Patrick Kenzie and his off-again lover Angela Gennaro (Prayers for Rain, 1999, etc.), Lehane tries his hand at a crossover novel that’s as dark as any of Patrick’s cases.
Even the 1975 prologue is bleak. Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus are playing, or fighting, outside Sean’s parents’ house in the Point neighborhood of East Buckingham when a car pulls up, one of the two men inside flashes a badge, and Sean and Jimmy’s friend Dave Boyle gets bundled inside, allegedly to be driven home to his mother for a scolding but actually to get kidnapped. Though Dave escapes after a few days, he never really outlives his ordeal, and 25 years later it’s Jimmy’s turn to join him in hell when his daughter Katie is shot and beaten to death in the wilds of Pen Park, and State Trooper Sean, just returned from suspension, gets assigned to the case. Sean knows that both Dave and Jimmy have been in more than their share of trouble in the past. And he’s got an especially close eye on Jimmy, whose marriage brought him close to the aptly named Savage family and who’s done hard time for robbery. It would be just like Jimmy, Sean knows, to ignore his friend’s official efforts and go after the killer himself. But Sean would be a lot more worried if he knew what Dave’s wife Celeste knows: that hours after catching sight of Katie in the last bar she visited on the night of her death, Dave staggered home covered with somebody else’s blood. Burrowing deep into his three sorry heroes and the hundred ties that bind them unbearably close, Lehane weaves such a spellbinding tale that it’s easy to overlook the ramshackle mystery behind it all.
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on his characters’ heads.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-16316-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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
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