Clete Purcel—private investigator, former cop, and war veteran with a hard shell covering just a few soft spots—is Dave Robicheaux's longtime friend and partner in detective work. But he has a troubled past. When Clete picks up his car from the local car wash to find it ransacked by a group of thugs tied to the drug trade, it feels personal: his grandniece died of a fentanyl overdose, and his fists curl when he thinks of the dealers who sold it. As Clete traces the connections in this far-reaching criminal enterprise, Clara Bow, a woman with a dark past, hires Clete to investigate her scheming, slippery ex-husband, and a string of brutal deaths all link back to a heavily tattooed man who lurks around every corner.
Fans of the previous Robicheaux books will not be surprised by this mingling of the metaphysical and mundane in what is essentially a fast-paced action-oriented thriller. Burke’s writing has long redefined Southern Gothic, forging a sui generis style that mixes woo-woo paranormal with lush and loving descriptions of the vanishing Louisiana wilderness, which stands as a contrast to human depravity ... Burke’s tropes threaten to devolve into tics at times ... May be masquerading as a whodunit, an action thriller that pits flawed good against implacable evil for a soul-satisfying wallop. But it’s more than that: It’s Beat poetry, suffused with sadness and longing for all those sunsets now gone.
It’ll come as no surprise to Burke’s fans that this is a perfectly constructed story told extremely well, and the opportunity to see Dave through the eyes of his best friend, from a new and rather intimate angle, absolutely should not be missed.
The continuing presence of Joan deepens and blurs Clete’s hard-headed first-person voice, making it more and more like the ruminative voice of his old friend Dave Robicheaux, the franchise lead who gracefully settles into a supporting role here. Devils and saints wrestle in the mud of bayou country.
