Pun Salad

This 2006 book is James Lee Burke's 15th novel featuring the intrepid Cajun detective, Dave Robicheaux. As usual, it features incidents buried in Dave's checkered past reverberating back up to the surface in sordid and violent ways, described with writing so good it will bring tears to your eyes.

Back in the 80's, when Dave was drinking, he failed to aid Dallas Klein, a friend getting held up in an armored car heist; Dallas wound up dead. Maybe Dave couldn't have stopped it even if he'd been sober; but the possibility has weighed on his mind for those many years.

But in the present day, Dave is doing his detective job with the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department. There's "Crustacean Man", a months-dead unidentified corpse discovered in a coulee by a highway, so named because his body is covered with crayfish when he's extricated; his injuries don't seem to be consistent with a normal hit-and-run. Also: a lovely young woman is an apparent suicide victim; although as far as anyone knew she was intelligent, sensitive, and virtuous, her body is full of drugs and booze, and there's evidence of multiple recent sexual partners.

And Dallas's now-grown daughter, Trish, has also appeared. And it looks like she's out to remove some money from casinos owned by the guy who was suspected to be behind the armored car heist. And (somehow) she hooks up with Dave's best friend, private eye Clete Purcel.

It doesn't seem like these things could be connected. But Dave has a feeling they are.

I really enjoy James Lee Burke's writing. See if you agree. Here's his description of the scene of the robbery, Opa-Locka, Florida:

Opa-Locka was a gigantic pink stucco-and-plaster nightmare designed to look like a complex of Arabian mosques. In the early a.m., fog from either the ocean or the Glades, mixed with dust and carbon monoxide, clung like strips of dirty cotton to the decrepit minarets and cracked walls of the buildings. At night the streets were lit by vapor lamps that glowed inside the fog with the dirty iridescence that you associate with security lighting in prison compounds. The palms on the avenues were blighted by disease, the fronds clacking dryly in the fouled air. The yards in the neighborhoods contained more gray sand than grass. Homes that could contain little of value were protected by bars on the windows and razor wire on the fences. Lowrider gangbangers, the broken mufflers of their gas-guzzlers throbbing against the asphalt, smashed liquor bottles on the sidewalks and no one said a word.