Product Description

In the waning days of summer, 2005, a storm with greater impact than the bomb that struck Hiroshima peels the face off southern Louisiana. This is the gruesome reality Iberia Parish Sheriff's Detective Dave Robicheaux discovers as he is deployed to New Orleans. As James Lee Burke's new novel, The Tin Roof Blowdown, begins, Hurricane Katrina has left the commercial district and residential neighborhoods awash with looters and predators of every stripe. The power grid of the city has been destroyed, New Orleans reduced to the level of a medieval society. There is no law, no order, no sanctuary for the infirm, the helpless, and the innocent. Bodies float in the streets and lie impaled on the branches of flooded trees. In the midst of an apocalyptical nightmare, Robicheaux must find two serial rapists, a morphine-addicted priest, and a vigilante who may be more dangerous than the criminals looting the city. In a singular style that defies genre, James Lee Burke has created a hauntingly bleak picture of life in New Orleans after Katrina. Filled with complex characters and depictions of people at both their best and worst, The Tin Roof Blowdown is not only an action-packed crime thriller, but a poignant story of courage and sacrifice that critics are already calling Burke's best work.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4653 in eBooks
• Published on: 2007-07-17
• Released on: 2007-07-17
• Format: Kindle Book
• Number of items: 1

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The pain, dismay and anger brought on by the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina explodes from the pages of this new Dave Robicheaux novel. For nearly a quarter of a century, Burke has used this series, despite their dark subject matter, to show his obvious love of the land, the people and the cultures of the South and specifically New Orleans. There is a mystery for Robicheaux to solve, but it's the destruction of Burke's beloved New Orleans that resonates like thunder throughout the book. Will Patton, who has come to embody the heart and soul of Burke's weary, Southern knight, matches the author's prose in all its intensity and pain. Adept as he is at portraying the eccentric, the evil and the endearing characters found in Burke's books, it is the actor's reading of Burke's descriptive passages, whether it be a storm forming off the Louisiana coast or the shock of blood escaping from a gunshot wound, that creates a fully realized world for the listener. Patton's insightful interpretation of Burke's darkly expressive imagery makes for a rich literary experience rarely achieved in crime fiction today.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Ever since Hurricane Katrina ravaged southern Louisiana in August 2005, James Lee Burke's fans have been waiting for this book, and Burke does not disappoint. Outraged and eloquent, the two-time Edgar Award-winner delivers a gut-wrenching portrayal of the storm's ferocity and devastating aftermath, venting through Robicheaux his frustration at the human incompetence and greed that magnified nature's destructive fury. His evocative, heartfelt prose, sympathetic characters, and intricately interwoven plotlines grip the reader from the first page. Burke's admirers will savor this latest installment, while those not yet acquainted with Robicheaux can start here, thanks to the comprehensive background information Burke provides in what critics call his best book yet.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* "I wanted to wake to the great, gold-green, sun-spangled promise of the South Louisiana in which I had grown up. I didn't want to be part of the history taking place in our state." That sentence wouldn't be out of place in any of Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels, all of which have been distinguished by their elegiac tone, but it's only fitting that it should appear in his latest, a heartfelt post-Katrina ode to a lost New Orleans and a lost world. In a sense, Dave Robicheaux, Burke's Cajun detective, whose heart is in the past and whose eyes are on the horizon, expecting trouble, has always been anticipating Katrina--or at least some form of cataclysm--as he has watched his world spin further and further out of control. But Katrina was no fictional event, and Burke writes about its aftermath as vividly and powerfully as any nonfiction chronicler. The plot itself, the investigation of the murder of two black men in the ninth ward, hinges on familiar Burke tropes--the powerless caught in a web of circumstance; surprising acts of nobility from the least likely people; unfathomable evil prompting eruptions of Robicheaux's thinly suppressed rage--but the novel's power comes from the way it explores the tragedy of Katrina in a way that is perfectly in tune with the series, a kind of perfect storm brought together by the confluence of fictional and nonfictional realms. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

An Elegy for New Orleans - Audiobook
This is the most horrifying description of post Katrina that I've read to date. Burke's lush descriptions of the beauty of New Orleans and Louisiana bayou country are gone, replaced by "bodies wrapped tight like mummies in the gray and brown detritus left by the receding waters." There were parts I had to close my eyes to listen to because the sense of place was so vivid and I couldn't stand what I was seeing. There were times I found tears rolling down my face without notice.

The story is vintage Burke with a little bit of "is it mystical magic or not" thrown in amongst the good vs. evil that is the cross on which Burke hangs his stories. Burke's politics is more evident here than in other books, with Bush bashing, gratuitous remarks about Fox News, etc., jarringly interrupting the story's magic. But yet, the depth of Burke's anger at what happened in New Orleans, the failures and abandoment, certainly is well-grounded, and he vents that anger for all to see.

You can read the publisher's summary to get a feel for the story, but even if Burke was writing about the recipe for a fish stew, I'd read it and it would be wonderful. There is not a writer alive today that can put you in the scene so completely - the smells, the sights, the scent of the breeze, the color of sunlight and shade, the fragility of a human soul and its wounds...he's just amazing.

This is a wonderful, achingly sad, and horrific story of how Burke mourns the City of New Orleans and what it once was. Dave and Clete have lost their anchor and their childhoods.

I'd give it 10 stars if possible.

The real deal...
I think that James Lee Burke outdid himself with his latest Dave Robicheaux mystery, The Tin Roof Blowdown. Burke has often used the backdrop of New Orleans for his often dark and tortured books. But no fictional event could have provided as much material as Hurricane Katrina did in 2005.

Dave Robicheaux is a detective with the New Iberia Sheriff's Department, outside of New Orleans. When Katrina hits the Crescent City, all outside law enforcement agencies sent available officers to aid with the chaos that resulted. Robicheaux spent time in Viet Nam, but nothing he saw in war could have prepared him for what he witnessed in New Orleans. When he left Nam, he thought he would "never again have to witness the wide-scale suffering of innocent civilians, nor the betrayal and abandonment of our countrymen when they need us the most. But that was before Katrina. That was before a storm with greater impact than the bomb blast that struck Hiroshima peeled the face off southern Louisiana."

In The Tin Roof Blowdown, bounty hunter and Robicheaux friend, Cletus Purcel, is trying to pick up some bail skips right before Katrina hits. But the same men that Purcel is after end up being wanted for a host of other crimes as well. Not only that, but they've stolen a fortune from the top Mafioso in New Orleans. So not only are the cops looking for them, but some unsavory characters are as well. How these characters all converge is vintage Burke.

One of the things I like best about Burke's books is that he makes the locale a major player in his stories. He has a love/hate relationship with New Orleans and calls her the Whore of Babylon. When driving through the ruined streets, he muses "New Orleans had been a song, not a city. Like San Francisco, it didn't belong to a state; it belonged to a people." He describes southern Louisiana with lush brushstrokes, from the bayous to the wildlife to the marshes. But where he outdoes himself in The Tin Roof Blowdown is in his descriptions of post-Katrina New Orleans. No pictures that you may have seen will accurately tell the story of what happened to this historic city as well as Burke does in narrative form. It is that vivid and that horrible.

James Lee Burke tends to publish a new Robicheaux every July. Fortunately for us, while prolific in his writing, he isn't publishing books just to meet a deadline. The Tin Roof Blowdown is the real deal.

In the wake of Katrina redemption is found...
Burke is the best around and he proves it again in the 16th Detective Robicheaux novel. He is able to capture the spirit of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast while telling a captivating story, and also illustrate much of what went wrong in our response to Hurricane Katrina--but he also shows what the human spirit can over come. Robicheaux's is investigating the shooting of one of two looters after they had looted the home of one of the city's most powerful mobsters. He Must find the surviving looter before the mobsters goons can get him. At the same time he is looking into the disappearance of a Ninth Ward priest who vanished while trying to save members of his congregation who were trapped by the hurricane flood waters. Burke is able to straddle the line between good and evil with each of his characters in such a way that the outcome is not foreseen and the gray areas are real. In the end though, the human spirit always shines through!