I have feeling that if I were an English major or at least more literature literate, I would love the great novels of James Lee Burke even more than I do presently! Creole Belle is the 19th Burke novel featuring Dave Robicheaux and is Book 14 for 2013 this one took a while to read, mainly because it is rather long (528 pages) and I got distracted by a couple of other books, but when I came back and picked it up about midway through, I zipped right through it, especially over the last two hundred or so pages. Like all the other books it’s a whopping good read!!
In his installment, Dave is in the hospital recovering from injuries sustained in the last book (hint: read The Glass Rainbow first!) anyway, a young woman Tee Jolie Melton, visits Dave in the hospital and leaves him an iPod with her songs on it including “My Creole Belle”. When Dave tells people this no one believes him because Tee Jolie disappeared weeks ago. Her sister has also disappeared only her body washes up on shore in a block of ice… with a message that Tee Jolie is still alive. Soon Dave is on a quest to find tee Jolie. Meanwhile Dave’s former partner and best friend Clete Purcell is confronted with problems of his own, some greaseballs are trying to shake him down for a past due debt…. when one of the slime balls is murdered, the hitman is a young woman, who Clete thinks is his daughter from a relationship years ago! Soon Dave and Clete are off their quests. Dave to find Tee Jolie and Clete to find and save his daughter and himself. Along the way they face some of the meanest and most diabolical foes they’ve ever faced and Dave, his family, wife Molly and daughter Alafair are all targets!!
As in all of Burke’s books, the all the characters are superbly developed and in this book the cast is very large! And the images of Louisiana paints with his probe, leave you smelling the bayou and the magnolias and wishing you could be there…. a fellow reader Sue at Goodreads included this passage in her review of Creole Belle and it is a great example of Burke’s writing:
“…The boughs of the cypress trees were as brittle and delicate as gold leaf in the late sun. An alligator gar was swimming along the edge of the lily pads, its needle-
nose head and lacquered spine and dorsal fin parting the surface with afluidity that was more serpent than fish.
…Then the wind gusted and a long shaft of amber sunlight
seemed to race down the center of the bayou, like a paean
to the close of day and the coming of night and the cooling
of the earth, as though vespers and the acceptance of the
season were a seamless and inseparable part of life that
only the most vain and intransigent among us would deny.”
So if you’ve never read James Lee Burke’s books go find The Glass Rainbow and then follow it up with Creole Belle and I’m sure after those two you’ll go back and read Dave Robicheaux’s 17 other adventures! Hell, you have to find out why Clete and Dave fight both their demons, and the bad guys!
As for me I finished just in time for the next installment coming in July, Light of the World