Publisher Description
A BRUTAL LEGACY OF CRUELTY AND HATE IS AWAKENED IN THE BAYOU
When Sonny Boy Marsallus returns to New Iberia after fleeing
for Central America to avoid the wrath of the powerful Giacana
family, his old troubles soon follow. Meanwhile Dave
Robicheaux becomes entangled in the affairs of the Fontenot
family, descendants of sharecroppers whose matriarch helped
raise Dave as a child. They are in danger of losing the land
they’ve lived on for more than a century.
As Dave tries to discover who wants the land so badly, he finds
himself in increasing peril from a lethal, rag tag alliance of
local mobsters and a hired assassin with a shady past. And
when a seemingly innocent woman is brutally murdered, all
roads intersect, and Sonny Boy is in the middle.
With the usual James Lee Burke combination of brilliant
action and unforgettable characters, Burning Angel is
the author at his best — showing that old hatreds and new
ones are not that far apart.
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“5 stars. Beautifully written. And the subject matter is fearsome: Dave Robicheaux’s way of treating with his world here clashes, even in dream, with a whole lot of forces, mores, and assumptions that pervade the world he lives in. ‘Even inside the dream I know I’m experiencing what a psychologist once told me is a world destruction fantasy. But my knowledge that it is only a dream does no good; I cannot extricate myself from it.’ He lives in a beautiful and deadly world, in which the great chain of being operates on the principle of ‘eat or be eaten’. But in the waking world at least Dave has to find a way to go on living in it. So he begins to make his choices, essays small interventions. He quickly finds himself in more than one another country, where nothing is as it seems and he must risk everything he loves to right imbalances, until his whole world makes sense to him again. And meanwhile, everything he is and loves remains at risk. At every turn he must decide what to let go of, what he needs to keep. ‘It was all that quick, as though a loud train had gone past me, slamming across switches, baking the track with its own heat, creating a tunnel of sound and energy so intense that the rails seem to reshape like bronze licorice under the wheels; then silence that’s like hands clapped across the eardrums, a field of weeds that smell of dust and creosote, a lighted club car disappearing across the prairie.’ A little masterpiece, this one, and maybe the only pure magic realism novel in the whole series too.”
—
Macha (5 out of 5 stars)
