A Private Cathedral

Starred review from March 30, 2020
A centuries-long feud between two warring criminal families might be coming to an end in MWA Grand Master Burke’s superb 23rd novel featuring New Iberia, La., cop Dave Robicheaux (after 2019’s New Iberia Blues), set loosely sometime before 9/11. Those who want to forge a union between the two clans, the Shondells and the Balangies, are pressuring teenage rock ’n’ roller Johnny Shondell to deliver Isolde Balangie, his teenage girlfriend and fellow singer, to his powerful, corrupt, and much older uncle, Mark Shondell, for what amounts to an arranged marriage. Johnny and Isolde decide to go on the run instead. Robicheaux’s efforts on behalf of the young couple lead to his developing a close relationship with Isolde’s mother, which causes a conflict of interest. Meanwhile, the lawman must contend with Gideon Richetti, a time-traveling golem. Gideon, whom Burke presents unabashedly as a supernatural being, appears to have pure malevolence on his mind, but he turns out to be a far more complicated creation. Along the way to the wild and bloody climax, alcoholic Vietnam vet Robicheaux contends with his various personal demons and gets some much needed help from PI pal Clete Purcell. An imaginative blend of crime and other genres, Burke’s existential drama is both exquisitely executed and profoundly moving. Agent: Philip Spitzer, Philip G. Spitzer Literary.

June 1, 2020
Burke wraps up the trilogy begun in Robicheaux (2018) and continued in The New Iberia Blues (2019) by taking a giant step into the past--actually, a Chinese box of criminal pasts. "In the days before 9/11," Detective Dave Robicheaux is working for the New Iberia Sheriff's Department. As usual, the felonies officially reported to the department represent only a fraction of his Louisiana parish's seething passions. When Isolde Balangie, seeing Dave at an amusement pier where heartthrob singer Johnny Shondell is singing, tells him that Johnny is delivering her to his uncle Mark and that she thinks all the Shondells should be killed because the family burned her ancestor at the stake 400 years ago, Dave makes a noncommittal response and quickly regrets it. Whether or not he plans to keep Isolde as his personal plaything, wealthy Mark Shondell clearly has a finger in any number of unsavory pies, and during a semiofficial visit to his home, Dave ends up beating the tar out of him. His fury doesn't seem to put off his old friend Clete Purcel, a private eye with an even shorter fuse, or Isolde's mother, Penelope, who, whether or not she's really Mark's wife, keeps throwing Dave smoldering looks he returns with interest. The discovery of the dismembered corpses of two minions Shondell's hired to follow Dave is only the first sign of the advent of Gideon Richetti, a time-traveling "revelator" whose deadly tango with Dave and Clete serves as the portal to a troubled past extending far before 9/11. Whether or not you buy the metaphor of reincarnation here, it goes a long way toward explaining the thread that links Dave's 23 grandly repetitive adventures. Not the best installment in this much-honored franchise, but the one that best explains its incantatory power.

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Starred review from May 1, 2020
With this all-enveloping mix of horror and crime, Burke concludes a trilogy that also includes The New Iberia Blues (2019) and Robicheaux (2018). All three books find Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux tackling powerful men with evil visions of racist grandeur. The supernatural has never been far from Robicheaux's world, but here it's front and center, mainly in the form of a time-traveling entity from the sixteenth century, Gideon Richetti, a self-proclaimed "revelator" capable of unimaginable carnage but also looking for atonement, like a demon trying to follow the 12-step program. Richetti is connected to Mark Shondell, a more flesh-and-blood incarnation of evil and the man with a plan to make America great again as a bastion of hatred. It starts for Robicheaux with a vision of "wine-dark waves" that seem right out of Homer, and soon he and running mate Clete Purcel are thrashing about in those waves, seemingly going in and out of time as they try to save Shondell's son, Johnny, and his lover, Isolde Balangie, from the clutches of Johnny's father. The supernatural elements may be difficult for those new to the series, but for longtime Burke readers, they feel just right. Meditations on time and the power of the past have always been at the heart of Burke's vision, and here they reach a new level of poetic rhapsody.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Burke's fortieth book and twenty-third Robicheaux novel mark a landmark event in the celebrated career of the 83-year-old crime-fiction master.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)