Crusader’s Cross

The book begins with Dave Robicheaux & his brother Jimmy in their early 20’s in Galveston, Texas. How they meet a prostitute named Ida Durbin who rescues them from a far off shore sandbag as Charles are circling them. Jimmy peruses her afterwords then finds out her sorted life circumstances and after a few weeks she mysteriously disappears. Then the book describes the young life in college & Vietnam War Dave experiences. The book then time travels to the present day in Iberia, Lousania where Dave is a twice widowed police officer there. In that place & in his capacity as a police officer the story unfolds regarding the infamous Ida Durbin and her circumstances in present day.
The book was masterfully written with such colorful accurate detail I felt I could see, smell, & experience the many interesting scenes described. I loved the read and am a big fan of James Lee Burke. A+

9-29-16. Terri Davis. Oklahoma City Ok

Burke’s wonderful but this one was a bit too much “more of the same”. Even with his Vietnam era trauma the main character, Dave Robicheaux, is more flawed than anyone who has been seriously involved in a 12 step program could be. If you can never learn new behaviors (like not almost killing any person who really pisses you off) then you are not working the program. Period. There is a moment in this book where Robicheaux overtly substitutes his dead wife Bootsie for his recent wife Molly (“I felt Bootsie step inside her skin”) — it’s just creepy and negates all the high minded talk at the end about how he knows the past is past and can’t be reconstructed. And Robicheaux is at heart extremely self-righteous as he careens from one disastrous act to another. So rationally I should say I will stop reading these but maybe not. Burke is also the most lyric crime writer I have ever read and his ability to write the minute picture within the big picture is stellar. Last word – if guys who can’t control their anger – like Dave Robicheaux – are kept on police forces – that explains a lot about what’s going on in America today.

James Lee Burke gets praised a lot, and there’s ample reason why. His writing is perhaps the best in the mystery genre, in terms of things like prose construction and dialog. His plots aren’t quite as good–he tends to rewrite the same story at least a little bit, and they don’t quite have the mystery aspect of say a good Michael Connelly story–but they’re serviceable, and anyway this is a mystery. The destination’s nowhere near as important as the journey, the setting, and the characters.

Dave Robicheaux is getting on now. He’s retired, living in a house he’s bought after the death of his wife. His daughter’s moved away, and what’s left of his personal life from previous books is his pet raccoon Tripod. Whiling away his life of boredom, he’s interrupted by a story from the distant past: when he and his brother were teenagers, they met a young prostitute for a brief time. She disappeared, and both of them had always assumed she died. The younger brother, however, also always held out a faint dim hope that she’d somehow survived. Now it seems there might some evidence that she did, and Dave’s brother wants to look for her. Meanwhile, someone’s killing women in the area, and eventually Dave rejoins the police department, working for his old partner, in order to find the killer.

Burke’s rather like one of my favorite detective writers, probably my favorite one growing up: Ross MacDonald. MacDonald was accused of writing the same book over and over again also, but the accusation is somewhat less than a real criticism, in my opinion. He was interested in old, wealthy families, the secrets that they keep, the things they do to maintain their status, the way that affects their lives and characters. Burke basically plows the same field, though the setting’s different (Louisiana instead of California) and his first person protagonist is a policeman (most of the time anyway) rather than a private eye. This book is another in that vein: there are wealthy people here, a family with a checkered and politically incorrect past who have made many compromises in order to maintain their wealth and station. This isn’t the first time Burke has dealt with this topic, but his writing here is at least as good, and maybe better, than anything he’s done in the past.

I did catch one amusing error: the author at one point refers to “Confederate Naval officer Raphael Sims”. I believe he must have been referring to Raphael *Semmes*. I wonder if he writes this by talking to a tape recorder, and then having someone else transcribe it. Perhaps his memory of the personality involved is just a bit faulty. The guy did have a big mustache (which was the reference).

I enjoyed this book, and would recommend it to almost anyone who wants a good mystery novel.

I’ve followed this author in the past and now find i am revisiting him to the degree that I am re-reading some.

After reading several of James lee Burkes previous novels I got the feeling of sameness throughout this one. I picked it up, put it down, again and again, but it did not compel me to continue to the end.

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