New Iberia Blues (2019) James Lee Burke

Why this review goes on too long…

As it happened, I was about 80 pages into this book when I had a stupid accident and broke my left hip and my left wrist (I’m left-handed). As I describe elsewhere here (XXXX) after that I spent > three weeks on my back in the hospital and and at a rehab place. This book on my bedside table waiting to get finished the whole time.

Before the EMTs carted me off to the Emergency Room they asked me what I wanted to bring to the hospital?

All I asked for was: my phone, a charging cable, and my current book (this one :)!

I didn’t pick up the book for the first week or so, then I started it again. I would read a bit, then dictate barely comprehensible notes about what I’d read into my phone’s Notes app. I’ve never gotten comfortable with dictation before, but what better time to learn than when one dominant arm is in a cast!

It was the only book I had with me, so I nursed it along. I finished it on the Tuesday morning of my last day at the rehab place. I would be going home to my beloved laptop and the other books I had in the queue before I was so rudely interrupted!

Now I’m at home, in a wheelchair in my lovely living room, typing with my good hand and my bad hand trying, pull all those piles of words together into something I can call a review.

The book: There’s a lot going on here

What a rich, complex book this is. You’ve got your core characters:

• Dave’s family (Dave, Alafair and let’s include Clete! 🙂
• Dave’s police department crew (Helen, the coroner, and the new kids we meet below)
• the movie crew you will meet soon,
• ——————–
• Then you’ve got all they wild and weird characters that wander in and out of these 400-odd pages:
  • The escaped Texas convict Hugo,
  • Axel and his corrupt cops cronies,
  • Travis, the sad, damaged jailhouse snitch,
  • Hilary the working girl, being heroic and trying to raise her baby in the trailer park,
  • Bella the compassionate blues singer, also heroic, has a quiet thing with Dave
  • The blues club where everybody runs into everybody! Where Dave (and Clete) first meet Hilary and Bella. It shows up so often I’m going to consider it a character :),
  • the New Jersey hit men,
  • the unclassifiably weird hit man Smiley.

Keeping track of everybody was kind of exhausting!

On to the actual review

Oh James Burke, I just can’t quit you!

I got this book out of the remodeled Petaluma Library New Books section.
The cover looked like something I oughta read. So far so good!

I have ranted elsewhere about how I’m over Burke books and their relentless gloominess and increasing weirdness. But this one started out like an early Burke book: a little gloomy, but no supernatural overtones, just good ole cops and robbers! A good thing, IMO!

Dave Robicheaux is still a Sheriff’s deputy. The complicated lesbian Helen is now his boss. He’s still hanging out with Clete, the star of the last Burke I read (that I didn’t like very much). He still lives with his adopted daughter Alafair.

Dave and Alafair live in a little house right on the bayou near downtown New Iberia Louisiana. Alafair is pretty much perfect in every way – super high IQ, accomplished writer, accomplished lawyer. It’s kind of annoying really. But it does all fit, because the real James Lee Burke has a real adopted daughter named Alafair Burke, who is a real successful novelist!

The Alafair in the book went to Reed College and Stanford Law and is now home with Dave, but she’s getting involved with the movie people which stresses Dave.

As I said I’m hoping this is just a regular Robicheaux book, no supernatural experiences, just a corpse or two that Dave and Clete have to figure out whodunit.

A dead body turns up. There are hints of the supernatural … Burke just can’t help himself I guess. But the narrative is pretty straight forward and the supernatural stuff turns out to be misdirections from the psychopath behind it all who is uncovered in the last pages.

So Burke is just having fun with it. He indulges his itch to plant hints of the supernatural at every body that turns up in this book. But in the end he “keeps it real” by having it all be the work of the actual madman. 🙂

Dave is visiting a famous movie producer’s house when he spots the body floating in the bay. The movie guy (Desmond) grew up dirt poor around here, and Dave knew him back in the day. So Dave feels comfortable dropping in on him with no police-related agenda … the first time. Every time he returns there is definitely a police-related agenda 🙂

In this first visit we are introduced to Demond’s fixation of the movie My Darling Clementine. His living room is dominated by a still shot from that movie of Henry Fonda and an actress named Cathy Downs, who plays Clementine.

We haven’t yet met Dave’s hauntingly attractive new deputy Bailey. She looks a lot like Clementine Carter in that picture, so after he meets her, Desmond is smitten and fixates on her as the Cathy Downs (the actress playing Clementine Carter) of the picture made flesh again. Not quite supernatural, but still a little weird.

While admiring the view from Desmond’s deck, Dave spots what looks like a body floating in the bay. Dave can see it, but Desmond and his creepily weird colleague Butterworth can’t see it. All just misdirection BS for no particular purpose, imo.

The next chapter we find that there really was a body and it is the young woman named Lucinda, the daughter of a local preacher who left for Hollywood and was never heard from again.

Dave’s ole buddy from all the way back to Vietnam, Clete shows up, as he almost always does eventually

A few days ago Clete was minding his own business, fishing by next to the railroad tracks out in the bayous somewhere. He sees a guy jump off a passing train. The very distinctive shirt the guy was wearing tells Clete he’s likely an escapee from a Texas prison. Clete shows up at Dave’s because he’s feeling guilty about not reporting it.

Things start getting complicated (p 24)

They get a report that a man named Hugo Tillinger has escaped from prison in Texas. Then we find that the dead girl Lucinda worked with the Innocence Project in Texas, and Clete turns up a tatted-up fellow (Travis) who saw her working with Hugo in prison back there.

Hugo was convicted of killing his wife and daughter, but maybe he’s innocent! So why did Hugo jump off the train here!
Clete points out he could have easily ridden it on to Florida, but this is where Lucinda is!

p31: Alafair starts being courted (for lack if a better term) by Desmond’s producer Lou Wexler, who notably drives a cherry red Lamborghini!

Introducing Bailey! (p 35)

Helen springs it on Dave that he’s getting a new partner named Bailey.

Brand new to the force, 28 years old, former school teacher, grad degree in Psychology, and of course, hauntingly attractive, … you can guess where this is going.

Dave instantly starts having lonely old guy thoughts. As mentioned above, Desmond fixates on her as the spitting image Cathy Downs (p 37). Over the ensuing pages the sparks start flying!

Another body (ch 5)

The next body to turn up is a non-descript man (Joe) in a hunting shack. He is laid out to resemable the Hanging Man of the Tarot deck. (a fellow upside down with one bent leg)

The fellow Butterworth we met at Desmond’s has a creepy past, and is the kind of guy who makes your skin crawl so he becomes the first likely suspect. Dave likes him for all the murders to the point of being fixated on him.

p 49: Dave invites Bailey to join him at Victor’s for coffee and pie … uh oh.

On the way there we have occasion to meet a corrupt fellow deputy named Axel. He appears a lot over the next third of the book before he becomes another body.

On location with the movie crew (ch 6)

Dav and Bailey head out to the movie set. The movie is a Vietnam-era drama, which is tailor-made to trigger Dave (and Clete for that matter), since most of the trauma they carry around every day stems from the horrors they experienced being grunts in Vietnam.

Today’s filming is of a Huey helicopter crashing and burning. Surprise, this makes Dave get weird. He says weird things to Bailey. She doesn’t quite know how to deal with it all.

p 56: Axel turns up again because Dave’s other deputy, Sean, clocks him in the face with a napkin dispenser for insulting “Miss Bailey”.

The blues joint out on the bayou

It’s not a person, but this place I will just call “the blues joint” is so intresting and appears so often in the book that it deserves a place in the list of characters.

It first appears here on p 58 harmlessly enough when Clete ambles in to drink too much and eat some of their heavenly fried chicken and listen to some blues.

In comes the jailhouse snitch Travis that knew Hugo back in Texas, followed by Axel and his corrupt cronies. Another feature of this blues joint is that everybody in the book keeps turning up here and running to each other.

While navigating all this we meet a black hooker named Hillary, who works out the bar, and turns out to be a stellar human being and one of the most sympathetic people in the book.

She appears right now just trying to keep Travis out of trouble. She doesn’t know him, that’s just the kind of big-hearted person she is.
… fat lot of good it did either her or Travis.

Axel and his buddies do unspeakable things to Travis, which occasions …

p 65: Dave to drive out to the blues joint the next night looking for Hillary as a witness.

No Hillary tonight, but Dave does meet the other doomed black woman (Bella) who graces this book until she’s snuffed out: Slim figure, green cowboy shirt with pearl snap buttons, mardi gras beads in her hair, and a guitar.

She’s the blues singer providing tonight’s music. Dave and her hit it off right from the start. They like each other! 🙂 It’s really very sweet. He’s still got a boner the next morning just thinking about her.

p 68: The next evening Dave drives out to Bayou Teche to Hillary’s trailer park.

In one of those touches that make Burke worthwhile, to get to the trailer park you drive past Alice Plantation, which sounds like is a real place, built in 1803 with “twin chimneys and an elevated gallery”. Then you cross a drawbridge and enter a trailer park “that looks transported from Bangladesh“.

Burke can paint quite a picture when he’s feelin it!

Miss Hilary is home! Her dinner is “in the micro”, so Dave follows her inside. Dave even goes into the next room and changes her baby so she can keep eating. Yay Dave!

Travis gets it

p 72: In a little psyche job by the author, Dave is dispatched back to Hilary’s trailer for a body, but the body is NOT her (yet), it’s no-luck Travis.

He had been seen at a Aryan Brotherhood bar at the same time as ole Hugo from Texas, who we haven’t heard from for a while.

So now we are up to three bodies – Lucinda, Joe, and Travis. This book should come with a scorecard.

Daughter Alafair springs it on Dave that she’s going to Arizona with the movie crew as a screenwriter. Dave takes it pretty well till she says she’ll go in “Lou’s private plane” (red Lambourghini guy in case you forget). Dave loses it on that, but she goes anyway.

p 78: “Unless you are familiar with the nature of Southern white trash … “
So begins a short soliloquy on southern white people, which was super interesting and informative.

Dave goes to Bailey’s house

Dave goes out for ice cream and coffee – he’s a recovering alcoholic in case you haven’t picked that up yet – and he just happens to walk by Bailey’s house.

It’s implied that her location is not one you would walk to unless it was on purpose. But he knocks, she welcomes him and they have a relatively nice uncomplicated conversation and he leaves. The guilt and complications come later in his head.

Alafair is hanging with Lou (ugh!) at the house, so naturally Dave decides to go out to the blues bar. He buys Bella a drink. She invites him back to her place. So when she’s off work at 2AM Dave returns to the club and picks her up. They are so cute together!

Because Dave is the weirdo he is, instead of taking her home he takes her to the cemetery of his second wife’s tombstone. Charming, right? Then he takes home. Dave is pretty intense!

p 99: The next day Dave goes to the library to research Tarot and such and delivers a nice little soliloquy on why we should all know about the classical world!

Hilary visits Clete

p 102: Hilary drives to Clete’s place to tell him about a man who’s “in her head”. A white man who’s not a client but has power over her for no reason. This mysterious guy calls Hilary the Queen of Cups, in case you needed one more hint that he is our Tarot Killer!

This make no sense to me. She’s a capable woman whose job as a prostitute has given her infinite experience with weird, broken white men. Yet this unnamed man who isn’t even a client takes control of her mind and she’s helpless to resist. Doesn’t ring true to me, but it does advance the plot!

Axel gets it

p 112: The despicable Axel turns up dead in his house. He’s laid out as the Fool from the Tarot, a Lincoln-green felt cap and beads in his hair. No one is sorry to see Alex go, but the bodies are piling up!

They try to pin it all on Butterworth. In the legal search they find draws full of incriminating stuff at Desmond’s – planted by the real killer we find out later. It, doesn’t amount to much, but suspicion is everywhere.

p 130: “Six weeks pass without significant incident”

Dave philoophizes about dead people and the meaning of life for a page or so, then we segue to Clete, who finds himsenlef back at the blues bar yet again, with lovely Bella on the stage.

p 133: Between sets, Bella drops by Clete’s barstool to ask “where’s your friend?”. She liked Dave also. :))

Hilary shows up at the other end of the bar, then ole Hugo the escaped con shows up and talks to her. Is he the weird-o who controls her mind? (Spoiler alert, no!).

I told you everybody keeps showing up here.

p 141: Dave goes off on an epic rant about the bygone days of an Eden-like southern Louisiana. I’m sure he’s right about that.

p 142: Dave takes vacation time and flies to Arizona with Alafair and the movie crew. He has a long, weird conversation with Lou the screenwriter who likes Alafair. Of course, many of Dave’s conversations are weird.

p 147: Next morning, guess who’s in the Arizona hotel dining room attacking a mound of pancakes? Good old Clete! … with Bailey on the way.

So the main cast of the book have all picked up and moved to Arizona for a few days. Ok…

Dave is having a lot of feelings – about Bailey, about Alafair and Lou, about that creep Butterworth, about Hugo Tillinger back in New Iberia. Dave sure beats himself up a lot. He flys himself home the next day.

p 161: Surprise, he’s back home about ten minutes before he heads to the blue bar to see Bella.

A physical freak named Frenchie, one of Axel’s corrupt cops, accosts Dave at the bar. He tries to bribe Dave into joining their corrupt crew. You can imagine how that went.

p 173: Dave was suspended from the force a few pages ago over the stuff with Clete. He doesn’t seem to mind too much. Bailey has also returned from Arizona, and shows up at Dave’s to essentially proposition him. That seems pretty un-creditable to me, but hey, it’s Burke’s book, he can make his characters do whatever he wants.

p 175: A GREAT little monologue on the nature of Acadiana.

• the Atchafalaya Basin is the largest wetland and swamp in the US.
• the Acadians ancestors were farmers and fishers expelled from Canada by the British in 1755
• Unlettered and pacifist, Acadians wandered for years (think Evangeline) before finding a home on Bayou Teche.

The whole digression was a set-up for Clete and Dave to go visit a colorful fellow named Cato Carmouche on his illegal houseboat. He knows about the Jersey Mob and that Desmond is in debt to them.

p 180: A weird little contract killer with a lisp named Smiley turns up. He appears a LOT in the rest of the book.

Hilary gets it

p 184: She was killed in a bloody and gross way. Bailey, the resident Tarot expert says the sequined star on her forehead reprsents the Suit of Pentangles. Pentangles, or diamonds, represent prosperity and personal esteem.

p 189: Clete on Hilary’s trailer park:
“Why does this place remind me of a killing groundin Cambodia?”
“Because this was a slave cemetary“
The slave cemetery for the antebellum mansion right across the bayou!

This very Burkean interlude illustrates some of his obsessions:

• Civil War history
• lives of poor blacks vs white slave owners
• undertones and overtones of the supernatural!
• the Vietnam disaster

Dave calls on the ladies

p 199: Sunday afternoon, Bailey invites Dave to a cookout for two!

They are both damaged, weird people who have the strangest, passive-agressive conversations. He hurts her feelings again, and leaves yet again.

I don’t think the two of them finish a meal together in the whole book, no matter how many times they’ve started a meal togther!

Dave’s in a really shitty, dry-drunk kind of mood. He goes to a nameless bar and gets into it with the bartender over calling him Mac instead of Dave.

p 207: Next stop Bella’s house. He spends the night there, but apparently remained chaste.
Says Bella: “You hurt me a little bit, you wouldn’t let me do nothing for you“.

They are SO cute together!

Hugo does NOT get it!

p 210: There was a bloody mess at Hugo’s motel room, but there’s no body!
It was a failed hit by a couple of Jersey mob hitmen. It serves as a Chekhov’s gun device, because the Jersey guys re-appear and move the plot along a time a couple of more times until they also get it.

p 214: Dave and Bailey find Hugo’s notebook in the motel room. For reasons that are not clear to me, Hugo has described where and how and to whom Desmond (the movie director) was born. Why is this here?

Again, the reason it’s here makes no sense, but it advances the plot in that now they know who Desmind’s was, Dave and Bailey drive out to Desmond’s dad’s trailer park to dance around about Desmond’s back story for a few pages.

p 229: For some reason the Jersey hitmen tangle with the weird little guy (also a hitman) Smiley for 10 pages or so, which was bad news for them, because weird little Smily was better at killing than they were. So add them to the casualty count.

p 238: Dave still has the hots for Bailey, and sublimates that into a visit to Bella. Then he does go to Bailey’s house where they go to a concert together.

p 241: they FINALLY consummate their desire as we say!

I am running out of steam

There are still 200-odd pages left in this book (p 245 to p 447) and I need to get on with my life!

What follows are impressions from my notes just to wind this thing up:

• p 270: everybody keeps running into everybody everywhere
• Dave sees Sean (the very earnest young deputy we met earlier) at the blues club.
  This somehow draws Sean into the drama and he shoots Hugo Tillerson at Bella’s house. (confused yet?)
• .The movie people are stressing about money. They are in debt to bad people, the Jersey mob among others.
• Dave really doesn’t like Lou, the guy wooing Alafair.
• The other crooked cop, the one with the head like a football is killed, but the coroner thinks it was a fake suicide for insurance.
  • Why? How does this advance the plot?
• p 310: we discover that Bailey was gang-raped as a teenager.
  • As to the guys that did it, she fixed them up real well!
  • She set their meth lab on fire with them in it and burned their asses up!
  • Does this mean she is the psycho-killer?
    • answer: no … but she IS a bad-ass!
• Dave sure has weird conversations.
• Dave REALLY likes and respects Bella. She keeps offering to “make him feel better”, but you know how Dave is …
• Bella is eventually murdered.
  • It was either that or she was gonna be Dave’s fourth wife!
  • Her murder steams Dave more than anything else so far.
  • Me too really…
• Lou Wexler, Clete, and Alafair all run into each other at the gym.
  • Not sure what the point was, but we’re all starting to get a feeling about Lou.
• People sure hallucinate a lot in this book.
• Weird little Smiley takes a bullet somewhere alone the line (from the Jersey hit men?). He can’t go to the doctor since he’s a wanted man. He hangs on for 10-20 pages, has a couple of conversations with dead people, then passes over to the other side himself.
• Wexler kidnaps Alafair, Clete takes two bullets freeing her, but survives to appear in the next book.

The End … Spoiler Alert … how everybody ends up!

In this section you be told who was the psycho-killer and how the characters who are still un-murdered at the end of the book end up.

As was hinted above, Wexler was the bad guy.

He kidnapped Alafair, Clete took two bullets freeing her, but kept on chugging.

There is an afterword where nine month later Dave and Alafair and a still-recouperating Clete rent a house on stilts on Bodega Bay.

• The Bodega part is believable,
• but then they have a wild time at a street party in Santa Rosa which I do NOT find believable. :).

Lou Wexler did it!

It all kind of makes sense in that he has infinite resources, and was always around all the major players. Lived at Desmond’s house, went with him everywhere. Got close to Alafair so he could spread his poisonous thoughts into everyone in Dave’s life and all the movie people. He must have been the mystery man controlling Hilary’s brain…. still don’t find this believable.

The semi-supernatural trappings surrounding each of the murders are explained away as mis-directions by Wexler.

He was a master deceiver who was making everybody suspicious of everybody.

Desmond and Bailey get married in Arizona. Dave is invited but of course does not attend. Recall that Desmond was obsessed with Bailey looking just like Clementine Carter in the movie poster. So Desmond gets to scratch that itch and marry Clementine Carter!!

Doesn’t sound like the best way to build a relationship with a real woman who is not actually Clementine Carter, but what do I know?

Bailey and Desmond return to Hollywood, which is nice and tidy because it gets her out of New Iberia where she would disturb Dave’s thoughts for a long as she was there. Dave can calm down and think other thoughts! 🙂 Knowing Dave, he will still feel guilty and blame himself for everything, but at least the proximate cause won’t be seeing Bailey Ribbons every day! With Bailey off to Hollywood and Bella murdered in the last few pages, both the fine women that tempted Dave throughout the book are out of the picture. He can start over getting weird about someone else in the next book.

• The kid, Sean is blameless,
• Bailey is blameless,
• even weird ole Desmond is blameless.
• Basically everybody but Wexler is blameless.

It was all Wexler!!