Light of the World

Starred review from June 3, 2013
Bestseller Burke’s 20th Dave Robicheaux novel (after 2012’s Creole Belle), a powerful meditation on the nature—and smell—of evil, finds the Louisiana sheriff’s detective on vacation in Montana with family and friends. There they are hounded and haunted by a psychopathic serial killer, Asa Surrette, believed to have been killed in a prison van accident. Surrette has a fate worse than death in mind for Robicheaux’s journalist daughter, who interviewed him in prison. Meanwhile, his friend’s daughter, one of the most damaged women in detective fiction, is working on a documentary on shale oil extraction, earning her some powerful enemies. This book could easily have been subtitled “Daddies, Don’t Bring Your Daughters to Montana,” as people don’t just get killed: they’re tortured, disfigured, and eviscerated. Robicheaux himself remains haunted by his experiences in Vietnam. But even as the stomach roils, the fingers keep turning the pages because the much-honored Burke (two Edgars, a Guggenheim Fellowship) is a master storyteller. Agent: Philip Spitzer, Philip G. Spitzer Literary Agency.

September 30, 2013
Will Patton has read several Burke books before, and that experience shows. In this audio edition of the author’s 20th crime novel featuring Louisiana detective Dave Robicheaux, Patton boasts a confidence that can only come from experience. Robicheaux is a melancholy character, naturally enough given his life experiences, which included a stint in Vietnam and the death of his father in an oil rig explosion. Patton is completely convincing in the part, offering a perfect Cajun accent to accompany his sorrowful tone and pacing. This time around, Robicheaux and his family are trying to relax in Montana, but a murderer who escaped from prison targets his journalist daughter. Patton proves equally effective at portraying the book’s other characters, regardless of gender. Given the book’s conflict, providing the bad guy with a distinctive and menacing voice is crucial—and Patton succeeds there as well. A Simon & Schuster hardcover.

July 15, 2013
Dave Robicheaux's latest Montana vacation is beset by demons old and new. It's a long way from New Iberia, La., to Big Sky country, but some things never change, like the constant threat of violence from unknown quarters. Or not so unknown, since Dave's adopted daughter, Alafair, is sure that psycho rodeo cowboy Wyatt Dixon (In the Moon of Red Ponies, 2004, etc.) is the man who shot an arrow at her head. But Dave's not so sure: A growing pile of evidence suggests that the archer was Asa Surrette, the mass murderer Alafair interviewed years ago in a Kansas prison for a true-crime book she gave up writing in horrified disgust. Surrette, reported dead in a flaming car crash, gives every indication of being alive, active and as malevolent as ever. That spells major trouble for Dave, who's staying with novelist/teacher Albert Hollister; his old buddy Clete Purcel, who's falling for Felicity Louviere, the unhappy wife of Caspian Younger, whose fabulously wealthy daddy, Love, has a summer place nearby; Gretchen Horowitz, the contract killer last seen executing her gangster father in Creole Belle (2012); and of course Alafair, the ultimate target of Surrette's sadistic wrath. Series regulars will find no immunity from physical or spiritual maiming at the hands of Missoula County Sheriff's Deputy Bill Pepper, his replacement, Jack Boyd, or younger hireling Kyle Schumacher. Instead of simply absorbing threats and punishment, however, the good guys dish them out with a single-minded intensity that comes back to haunt them during the many reflective moments when they wonder what really separates them from the bad guys after all. Pruning away the florid subplots that often clutter his heaven-storming blood baths, Burke produces his most sharply focused, and perhaps his most harrowing, study of human evil, refracted through the conventions of the crime novel.

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Starred review from May 1, 2013
Hats off to the Library of Congress cataloger who applied the subject heading Good and Evil to Burke's latest Dave Robicheaux novel. In that simple tag lies the core of this acclaimed series. Robicheaux, the Cajun detective with a melancholy streak as wide as the Mississippi, grieves lost innocence in all its forms, but as much as he remembers goodness in the past, he crusades against evil in the present. The bad guys against whom Robicheauxalong with his equally tormented comrade-in-arms, Clete Purcellcampaigns sometimes take the form of bent rich guys driven by blind greed. But occasionally the evil comes in a more chilling, vaguely supernatural formdepravity beyond sociologygiving these novels a darker, more mythic tone, with Robicheaux cast as a contemporary Beowulf, asked to plunge deep into the heart of darkness to confront the Grendels lurking beneath the surface of daily life. So it is here, when serial killer Asa Surette, believed dead, resurfaces in Montana with scores to settle, including one with Robicheaux's daughter, Alafair. The plot plays out in a manner that will be familiar to Burke fans, including a firestorm of a climax near Flathead Lake, but there is one big difference: no longer is it just Dave and Clete sallying forth, armed to the teeth, to slay the monster. No, this time it's a family affair, with the next generationAlafair and Clete's daughter, Gretchen, who surfaced in Creole Belle (2012)also locked, loaded, and standing alongside their fathers in the final confrontation. It sounds over the top, but it works, enveloping the reader in the visceral terror of the moment and reminding us that Grendel may still swim in our midst. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Burke has won two Edgars and been named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America; his Dave Robicheaux novels routinely lodge themselves on the New York Times bestseller list. This one will, too.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)