THE TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN: A Dave Robicheaux Novel
James Lee Burke
Simon & Schuster
Thriller
Hardcover: 1416548483
Paperback: 9781416548508

• Read an Excerpt

The great novelist Ed McBain once told me that every mystery needs a corpse in the first few pages or somebody about to become a corpse. In THE TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN, James Lee Burke put his corpse on page 2. His longtime protagonist, New Iberia detective Dave Robicheaux, awakens from a nightmare about his days in Vietnam.

Robicheaux says, "When I go back to sleep, I once again tell myself I will never again have to witness the wide-scale suffering of innocent civilians, nor the betrayal and abandonment of our countrymen when they need us most.

"But that was before Katrina. That was before a storm with greater impact than the bomb blast that struck Hiroshima peeled the face off southern Louisiana. That was before one of the most beautiful cities in the Western Hemisphere was killed three times, and not just by the forces of nature."

Art reflects the world and time in which it is created. At its greatest, art can tell the truth about suffering and dying in a way that journalism never can. Think of Picasso's Guernica. No American novelist is more closely associated with New Orleans than James Lee Burke. THE TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN is one of his greatest, darkest works. He has managed to build a gripping suspense story around one of America's worst moments and take readers on a harrowing journey into the heart of the country's darkness.

The Robicheaux stories have always been an elegy to the lost world of South Louisiana. Those were the days, Burke writes, of "duck-hunting dawns and summer-afternoon crab boils in a shady pavilion and college dances on Spanish Lake under oak trees that were strung with Japanese lanterns."

One of the most fascinating features of this series is the highly damaged character of Robicheaux that Burke has created over the past 20 years. Robicheaux is a recovering alcoholic struggling to stay sober, a man who has seen too much of the darkness and is angst-ridden and haunted by it. Yet he is a good man, constantly seeking redemption. As his wife and ex-nun, Molly, says at one point in this book: "You take on other people's suffering without their ever asking. Your greatest virtue is your greatest weakness." Here, he will be tested as never before. "It was a season of death," Burke writes.

The novel starts with Robicheaux concerned about a childhood friend, a dying, junkie priest named Jude LeBlanc. Father LeBlanc sets off on a suicide redemption mission of his own, commandeering a boat and trying, armed only with an ax, to rescue people trapped in a church attic as the water rises in the Lower Ninth Ward.

That is the last anybody sees of the priest; the people in the attic all drowned. Later, uptown, four young looters sail into a rich neighborhood on a boat. It just so happens they chose a fateful street. On one side lives a man, Otis Baylor, whose teenage daughter was brutally gang-raped by men fitting the description of the looters. They were never caught by the police. Otis owns a high-powered sniper rifle.

Soon, one looter is shot dead in the water and another is left paralyzed by a bullet through the throat. Before that happens, the looters make another fatal mistake --- they loot and trash the deserted home of a brutal local crime boss, stumbling upon a stash of blood diamonds worth millions. One of the looters escapes in the boat with his critically injured brother and the valuable stones.

With law enforcement stretched thin, Robicheaux is assigned to the murder, with all evidence pointing to the father of the raped girl as the culprit. But the story soon revolves around the diamonds. The mob boss, who has a reputation for settling scores by using a chainsaw on his enemies, wants them back.

Then two mysterious mercenaries known for their expertise in "interrogation," which is the government euphemism these days for torture, appear on the scene, joining the hunt for the stones. Are they working for the mob or the federal government? Is there a link between the stones and terrorists?

One of these mystery men, Ronald Bledsoe, is among the most chilling characters Burke ever invented. He is a man of pure evil who quickly takes a leering interest in Robicheaux's adopted daughter, Alafair. Robicheaux not only has to try to solve the case but also protect his family from a psychopath. At the same time, the detective must avoid becoming the evil he is fighting.

Of course, he has the help of another damaged series regular, Clete Purcell, who is described as "a beer soaked blue-collar knight errant."

Katrina is the most ominous character in this book because it was real. Burke shows us scenes of the storm's aftermath: bodies of old people left to rot in the streets by the city's convention center and survivors smashing their china to bits upon learning that their insurance companies will not cover water damage. And of course, there is the grim ghost of the Ninth Ward of Orleans Parish, still in ruins two years later.

Burke writes, "The topography, the windowless houses, the layers of building debris and garbage and dried flotsam did not look real but instead resembled a movie set or perhaps scenes spliced together from World War II black and white footage of a bombed-out city, leached of color, the only light provided by cook fires wavering under sheets of corrugated tin the remaining residents had propped across cinder blocks or stacks of bricks."

Burke has written a first-rate, engaging mystery in THE TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN. But he has also accomplished something far greater. He has penned an angry and sad book about the murder of an American city, about a time when we saw, in his words, "an American city turned into Baghdad on the southern rim of the United States."

What is really sad is that it was not just the forces of nature that did it. New Orleans also was victimized by the man-made forces of neglect, indifference, racism, greed and lies. And that is the real heart of darkness Burke exposes here. But he also shows us that the quest for redemption, even among the most badly damaged souls, can be never-ceasing and a thing of beauty and hope in its own right. The ending of this book will stay with you for a long time.

    --- Reviewed by Tom Callahan

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