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Sheriff Dave Robicheaux returns to New Orleans to investigate the beating of a controversial Catholic priest and murder of three teenage girls in this intense, atmospheric entry in the New York Times bestselling series. For Dave Robicheaux, there is no easy passage home. New Orleans, and the memories of his life in the Big Easy, will always haunt him. So to return there means visiting old ghosts, exposing old wounds, opening himself up to new, yet familiar, dangers. When Robicheaux, now a police officer based in the somewhat quieter Louisiana town of New Iberia, learns that an old friend, Father Jimmie Dolan, a Catholic priest always at the center of controversy, has been the victim of a particularly brutal assault, he knows he has to return to New Orleans to investigate, if only unofficially. What he doesn't realize is that in doing so he is inviting into his life-and into the lives of those around him-an ancestral evil that could destroy them all. A masterful exploration of the troubled side of human nature and the darkest corners of the heart, and filled with the kinds of unforgettable characters that are the hallmarks of his novels, Last Car to Elysian Fields is Burke in top form in the kind of lush atmospheric thriller.… (more)
One of the slower Burke novels. I never completely got into it and felt it dragged on far too long. Still it is a Burke novel which means it is better than most things out there. ( )
I am reading the older novels of Mr. Burke. I am fascinated with his writing and his characters. Max Coll and Junior Crudup are two I'll not forget soon. As always I am impressed with the scenic descriptions and the obvious love/hate relationship Dave has with Louisiana; love for what once was and hate for what is now. ( )
James Lee Burke tells a good story. His protagonists are flawed and the bad guys are really bad. It may not be great literature but it holds my interest. I have never been to Louisiana where most of his mysteries are set in Cajun Bayou Country but his descriptions of the people, the culture, the land and the food really make me want to go there. This story had one particularly bad character, a former Irish Republican Army member who reinvented himself as a paid hitman. As always in Burke mysteries the protagonist, Dave Robicheaux, New Iberia LA Sheriffs Detective gets shot at and beaten up a few times before he solves the crime. And as always he offends nearly everyone before he is done. ( )
To my wife, Pearl, and my children, Jim, Jr., Andree, Pamala, and Alafair
First words
The first week after Labor Day, after a summer of hot wind and drought that left the cane fields dust blown and spiderwebbed with cracks, rain showers once more danced across the wetlands, the temperature dropped twenty degrees, and the sky turned the hard flawless blue if an inverted ceramic bowl.
Quotations
Last words
But I'm sure one find day, when I least expect it, the pelicans will return to Bayou Teche, and in the meantime I share my thoughts about them with no one, except perhaps Snuggs and Tripod, who, like me, sleep little and wake before first light.
Sheriff Dave Robicheaux returns to New Orleans to investigate the beating of a controversial Catholic priest and murder of three teenage girls in this intense, atmospheric entry in the New York Times bestselling series. For Dave Robicheaux, there is no easy passage home. New Orleans, and the memories of his life in the Big Easy, will always haunt him. So to return there means visiting old ghosts, exposing old wounds, opening himself up to new, yet familiar, dangers. When Robicheaux, now a police officer based in the somewhat quieter Louisiana town of New Iberia, learns that an old friend, Father Jimmie Dolan, a Catholic priest always at the center of controversy, has been the victim of a particularly brutal assault, he knows he has to return to New Orleans to investigate, if only unofficially. What he doesn't realize is that in doing so he is inviting into his life-and into the lives of those around him-an ancestral evil that could destroy them all. A masterful exploration of the troubled side of human nature and the darkest corners of the heart, and filled with the kinds of unforgettable characters that are the hallmarks of his novels, Last Car to Elysian Fields is Burke in top form in the kind of lush atmospheric thriller.
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