Rating: 
Summary: Angel Descending
Review: Set in the bayou country of Louisiana, 'Burning Angel' by James Lee Burke blends gritty crime fiction with an understated supernatural element that is both suspenseful and entertaining. Homicide detective Dave 'Streak' Robineaux investigates a double murder that involves Sonny Marsallus, a local gambler, money-launderer, and soldier of fortune. Robineaux isn't the only one interested in Marsallus; a shadowy cadre of assassins wants Sonny dead. During his investigation, Robineaux gets sidetracked into a land dispute between the poor, black Fontenots and an upper-class attorney, Molleen Bertrand. Burke displays a dazzling command of language and descriptive power, and his vision of the South is elegantly drawn, where ghosts of the past seem close at hand. The main characters, particularly Robineaux, Marsallus, and Bertrand are finely honed, as are the pimps, thugs, and crime lords of New Iberia. The book only falters in the depiction of the Fontenots. Burke is keenly sensitive to the plight of this family, cast as helpless victims to malevolent external forces (in this case an amoral white overclass). Although we empathize with the Fontenots, characters stripped of free will (and thus unable to influence events) are never interesting. Nevertheless, 'Burning Angel' is wonderfully paced and well written, and Burke's soaring prose elevates it to dizzying heights. Lost loves and family secrets haunt these characters, and as Robineaux visits the Bertrand plantation one last time, Burke closes with an epilogue that is a tour-de-force of sheer craft: "And like some pagan of old, weighing down spirits in the ground with tablets of stone, I cut a bucket full of chrysanthemums and drove out to the Bertrand plantation...all our stories begin here--mine, Molleen's, the Fontenot family's, even Sonny's." The story of the South begins and ends on the plantation. On this ground Burke seeks the interconnectedness of things; life begins in a lover's tryst, and ends in a graveyard, as Lee's phantom army marches through the trees. It is a remarkable gesture, a sweeping vision of life and death that lifts this book beyond its genre into something else, something that rings true in the human heart, something that we call art.
Rating: 
Summary: Desperately Sentimental, Strains Credibility
Review: Well, once again, poor James Lee Burke is back, with his patented mix of stale Sixties cliches and nauseating sentimentality about the glories of the Antebellum South. Each book in the series is like a cross between EASY RIDER and GONE WITH THE WIND, with all the phoniest elements of each. Pseudo-liberal good ole boy Dave Robicheaux gets all bent out of shape when Eye-talian mobsters and no-account Yankees from the CIA start pushing around local blacks and stealing their humble little cabins for some nefarious Northern scheme. Poor Dave gets all misty just thinking about the saintly Robert E. Lee and his heroes in homespun gray. Bashing the mob and the CIA is the only way he can keep his illusions intact. But when the ghost of General Lee appears in drag, warning Dave to stop lying to himself about the stupidity and corruption of his own ancestors, it looks as though another AA meeting is all that stands between a corrupt, booze-sodden phony and his inevitable moment of truth. This books reads like George Wallace wrote it after dropping acid and locking himself in a room with Joan Baez for two days.
| 
