Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #47194 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The refreshing thing about James Lee Burke's new Dave Robicheaux thriller Last Car to Elysian Fields is that Dave, in many details of the case, is allowed to make a mess of things. We always get uneasy when a series detective is too perfect and the death of his wife and the departure of his daughter to college have robbed currently dry alcoholic Dave of his good angels. His bad angel on the other hand, his roughneck detective friend Clete, is still in rumbustious, corner-cutting violent business as he and Dave connect up the dots and find the links between an IRA hit man with a conscience, a long-dead blues singer, a priest crusading against illegal dumping and yet another of Dave's disturbed upper-crust exes. The atmosphere is always important here--the glamour, glitz and squalor of New Orleans and the fragile beauty of the Louisiana coastline and swamps. What is particularly significant here, though, is a sense of the characters having spiritual lives as well as a daily grind of coffee and pancakes and sniffing the fresh sea air; James Lee Burke writes thrillers with real heart. --Roz Kaveney

Sunday Times
Burke writes with a lyrical sweetness that brings Louisiana's bayou country alive'

Review
'finely written, tightly plotted, morally complex crime fiction... mix yourself a mint julep... and enjoy an invigoraiting shot of bayou blues' (Boyd Tonkin The Independent )

'Burke writes with a lyrical sweetness that brings Louisiana's bayou country alive' (Sunday Times )

Customer Reviews

Troubles in New Iberia
Dave Robecheaux's life has moved on considerably since the 'Jolie Blon's Bounce' episode. He is now a much more contemporary figure in 'Last Car to Elysian Fields' by James Lee Burke. It is always easy for a character to have no firm time boundaries but this time Burke is keen that we readers will have no doubt about the time of events in his latest novel. Burke has performed something that must be difficult, he has created a void, a space left by Burke's deceased partner Bootsie. This void has a gravity all of its own and its target is poor Dave. This time its not the despair of an alcoholic but rather the mourning and loss a partner must travel through, and hopefully come out the other side. The story has a pace that keeps one hooked as Dave and Clete explore the backround to a rich Louisiana business man. Dave's search is centred in the past where he discovers the reasons behind a prisoners disappearnce. As usual Clete is in the present trying to counsel Dave through his bereavement, as well as acting as a sort of human exocet device without any stealth technology. In an earlier novel Dave met a character called Legion who managed to both outsmart Robecheaux at one point and leave a kiss firmly planted on Dave's lips. Whatever one makes of that incident remains to be seen, however in the present novel Dave is humiliated in a far more personal attack. These strange and disturbing encounters seem part of a greater plot that Burke is planning that fails to fill one with anticipation. There is relatively little of Burke's rich and descriptive prose describing the Louisiana environment this time around. It is this talent that has, I believe, made the novels so addictive. So there may be a sea change taking place, a turbulence that is in itself unpredictable in its effects on the characters. In spite of these observations, a great read.

Investigating criminals who operate "with public sanction."
Describing New Orleans as "an outdoor mental asylum located on top of a giant sponge," Burke makes the city itself a character in this study of power and justice, murder and mayhem. Once again, Dave Robicheaux is the local homicide detective who tries to sort out crimes and bring evil-doers to justice, as he has done in previous Burke novels. This time, however, we see Robicheaux as a darker, more vengeful investigator, a man willing to do whatever is necessary to bring guilty parties to justice within this notoriously corrupt political and judicial system. His wife has died, his daughter is in college, and without the family support system which previously "humanized" him, he is now a man with nothing to lose.

Accompanying Fr. Jimmie Dolan though Toxic Alley, a wetlands area where waste disposal contractors have poisoned the groundwater and sickened dozens of young black children with their illegal dumping, Robicheaux visits the granddaughter of Junior Crudup, a blues singer and guitarist from the 1950s, who disappeared in Angola Penitentiary. Determined to discover what happened to him, Robicheaux also wants to know who is responsible for the recent beating Fr. Dolan, the Catholic priest. While this plot is unfolding, three seventeen-year-old girls die in a car crash, shortly after stopping at an illegal "drive-by daiquiri store." The manager of the store soon shows up dead, and his connections to other, supposedly legitimate local businessmen come under scrutiny. The business of pornography and drugs bring Mafia hitmen into the city, and soon bedlam breaks out, as the local police, county police, state undercover agents, and the FBI all lay claim to investigation.

Successfully incorporating a great deal of historical background into the action, Burke shines a spotlight on the criminal activity, showing the reader its scope and giving some perspective on how and why the social problems we observe in the novel came into being. Marauding white street gangs of the 1950s, the systemic sadism of the penitentiary and its Red Hat Gang of the '50s, virulent racism, the rise to power and wealth of men engaged in dishonest businesses, the collusion of police and their reward of lucrative payoffs, the activities of organized crime syndicates, and the ability of those in power to manipulate both the political and legal systems are all shown to be contributing factors in the corruption we observe in these plot lines. Descriptive but sometimes brutal in its action, the novel gives us a darker, more cynical Robicheaux, a man taking dangerous chances in a dangerous city, with seemingly little to lose.

Multidimensional Mayhem Unbounded!
Last Car to Elysian Fields marks a major turning point in the Dave Robicheaux novels. Dave seems cut loose from his few normal inhibitions and lives to regret his loose cannon ways. He's clearly a man headed for a crack-up, and his increased vulnerability makes him a more interesting character. The plot itself is as unpredictable and complex as you can imagine without becoming overloaded.

One of the beauties of this book is that any one of several mysteries would have been more than adequate to have made this an above-average book. For example, an ex-IRA hit man, Max Coll, has a gambling debt he cannot pay off. He's given the choice of killing a Catholic priest. In a second plot line, a talented songwriter and singer, Junior Crudup, found his way into the bottom of Louisiana's prison system from which he disappeared with no trace. The prisoner turns out to have been used as a laborer by a prominent war hero who denies remembering the prisoner. In a third plot line, a 17 year-old girl kills herself and two others while driving drunk. She got the booze at a drive-through "daiquiri window" . . . and someone wants to stop the investigation into the daiquiri window. Dave also finds the man who miswired his house . . . and caused Bootsie's death in an earlier book. Someone is bound to pay for that! In the background, there are also porn stars, ex-lovers, sleazeballs, and other assorted criminals. Against this backdrop, Clete Purcel is his most outrageous righter of wrongs.

After the book was over, I found myself thinking that this book must surely deserve to be a five-star book. Then, I realized that the novel leaves so little room for hope and redemption that I found myself more despairing about people than encouraged about them. I hope that in future books, Mr. Burke will also show redemptive qualities as well as the darker side of human nature.