Beautifully written descriptions of Louisiana, though I'm not crazy about the religious/Viet Nam/alkie bits - has the best last sentence of any book ever written outside Vera Caspary's EVVIE. ( )

Another New Orleans and New Iberia mystery with Dave Robicheau. The other usual characters and suspects. Bootsie, Alafair, Batist, Clete and some really bad Nazis. The Nazis were so bad they could hardly be called Neo-Nazis. Also a sunken German submarine in the mouth of the Mississippi River that had been there since 1943. Some bad violent people and some sad losers too. Can Dave catch the Nazis before they do more harm? Also in this story more than one AA meeting.
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A much better entry in the Robicheaux series than the previous one. Excellent plot, realistic action, and some decent stakes. And the villain was likely one of the best seen in the series so far. ( )

As he approached the seventh entry in his more or less annual Dave Robicheaux series of Louisiana thrillers, James Lee Burke seems to have felt he had a problem to solve. After the digression into the magic realism of In the Electric Mist, a return to a more standard hard-boiled mystery would seem to be in order. But who would make an interesting villain? You can't just have an ordinary sociopath. It's always a sociopath.

Wait! Let's make him a Nazi sociopath.

Mmm, not enough. Let's make him a gay Nazi sociopath.

No, wait--how about a gay Nazi sociopath who's a sadist and an expert torturer!

But what would such a character want from Dave? Hmm, Dave dives--let's say there's a sunken Nazi U-boat drifting around the Gulf coast for the last fifty years, and only Dave knows where it is. And the gay sadist Nazi sociopath wants it because--well, he's a Nazi! And, of course, the U-boat is full of Nazi treasure, which U-boats are known to carry.

The subtleties that make Burke's work interesting are mostly abandoned. Once again, there's an Italian mob family also involved. In every book, New Orleans has a new mob family that has always run things. Robicheaux always knows the leaders personally, and not infrequently, beats them up with something like impunity, which is usually explained as the result of pragmatism on the part of the criminals, although the same criminals are described as able to hold grudges for years and settle them in frightening and disgusting ways, regardless of surface appearance.

Preposterousness, of course, is not a dealbreaker when it comes to thrillers like this. But it should be more artfully disguised. Burke has always been great at making things emotionally realistic, however over-the-top the situation. Yet in one scene, Robicheaux returns home after a particularly brutal session with the villain, and the effect on his wife and 12-year-old daughter of seeing him badly injured is never acknowledged. That's the kind of easy out I wouldn't have thought Burke would allow himself. I think Burke erred, a few books back, in giving his hero a wife, a small daughter, and a well-known home address, given the danger he's frequently in, and the meanness of the characters he contends with. Their characterization suffers, as it does here, as they repeatedly become targets to be protected.

Has Burke put his real gifts aside and fallen into mere formula? ( )

I am reading the Dave Robicheaux series in order and got this one from hoopla from my local library. This is the story of a Nazi submarine in the waters near New Orleans. When a Jewish man in New Orleans tries to hire Dave to find the submarine it attracts some real lowlifes into his life. How Dave outwits the lowlifes makes for an interesting story. Really enjoyed this one. Loving the series so far. Highly recommend this book and the series. ( )