Bayou mystery is complex, cogent
Pegasus Descending
By James Lee Burke
Simon & Schuster, 368 pp., $26
Nobody else can write like James Lee Burke and get away with it. Combining the over-the-top ornamentation of Southern gothic with the merciless punch of noir, the Louisiana- and Montana-based mystery author piles it on. Yet somehow, particularly in his Louisiana-based Dave Robicheaux series, it works. Who else can start a reminiscence with ``while swacked on Cambodian red and a quart of stolen scotch," refer to Plato two pages later, and then dive into the Atchafalaya Basin, with its ``endless gray miles of flooded gum and cypress trees" without getting bogged down in all the verbiage?
Maybe this dense, ripe prose works because Burke is describing a protagonist who is equally complex and burdened. Over the course of 14 previous fictional outings, Robicheaux has crawled out of the muck, given up drinking and unnecessary violence, left New Orleans, and now works as a detective in his bayou hometown of New Iberia.
In this 15th book, ``Pegasus Descending," the Cajun cop's past continues to haunt him. As with last year's fine ``Crusader's Cross," a dark memory launches the action. This time out, the remembered episode comes from when Robicheaux was too deep in the bottle to save a self-destructive fellow vet, who got mixed up with mobbed-up Miami bookies and ended up dead. When those same bookies surface in New Iberia, and Robicheaux's crazy buddy Clete falls for the dead friend's gorgeous daughter, Robicheaux knows the past is back. And despite the best efforts of his sane, healthy wife and loyal boss, the big-hearted cop feels obligated to set old wrongs right. If he can't bring back Dallas Klein from the grave, he'll at least bring down the gambling dons who murdered him. If he can also avenge the unknown crimes that drove a beautiful young woman to suicide, he may even be able to sleep at night, without the horrible flashback dreams of drinking and Vietnam that wake him, sweaty and raw.
Gothic enough for you? There's more. In this fine installment in a strong series, Burke continues to tackle the complicated race and class issues that dog his poor Southern state. He even has Helen, Robicheaux's boss, attending a civil-preparedness conference. ``We toured the levees," she says. ``A one-hundred-sixty-mile-an-hour storm will turn New Orleans into a bowl full of oil and black sand," she adds, and hurricanes Katrina and Rita both make the epilogue. Like his flawed hero, Burke seems caught up in a state of perpetual mourning, aware of the horrors of the past and yet painfully alive to all that his home state is losing.
His response is, as always, complicated. Although Robicheaux tries desperately to remain on the right side of the law. ``Pegasus Descending" ends violently. At least one poor, honest family is crushed, and a rich boy gets a free pass. But if his culture, and his state, are doomed, Burke seems to see hope for individuals. That rich boy ``has his own appointment in Samarra waiting for him," Robicheaux believes. And a poor black street kid is given his own chance at redemption, or at least an honest job as a mechanic.
