Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Amity Public Library | MYS BURKE Dave Robicheaux # 10 | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Dallas Public Library | PBK Burke, J. Sunset | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Lyons Public Library | M BURKE | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Mount Angel Public Library | BURKE Dave Robicheaux #10 | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Salem Main Library | MYSTERY Burke, J. | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Sheridan Public Library | Burke Dave Robicheaux v.10 | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Silver Falls Library | FIC BURKE | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Detective Dave Robicheaux re-turns to center stage in an incendiary new novel by James Lee Burke. A gripping tale of racial violence, class warfare, and the sometimes cruel legacy of Southern history,Sunset Limitedis a stunning achievement, confirming Burke's place as one of America's premier stylists as well as master storytellers. "Not since Raymond Chandler has anyone so thoroughly reinvented the crime and mystery genre," said novelist Jim Harrison, and inSunset LimitedBurke continues to carve out new territory. As always in the fiction of James Lee Burke, the past impinges on the present: The forty-year-old crucifixion of a prominent labor leader named Jack Flynn remains an unsolved atrocity that has never been forgotten in New Iberia, Louisiana. When Flynn's daughter, Megan, a photojournalist drawn to controversial subjects, returns to the site of her father's murder, it quickly becomes clear that her family's bloodstained past will not stay buried. Megan gives her old friend Dave Robicheaux a tip about a small-time criminal named Cool Breeze Broussard, scarcely suspecting that the seemingly innocuous case will lead Robicheaux and his partner, Helen Soileau, into the midst of a deadly conspiracy. As New Orleans mobsters and mysterious hit men converge on his parish, Robicheaux soon finds that all the clues point back in time to the tortured death of Jack Flynn. Combining brilliant prose, crackling suspense, and an exquisite sense of character and place,Sunset Limitedis a wrenching tale of historic violence and soiled redemption that reveals one of America's finest novelists at his masterful best.
Author Notes
James Lee Burke, winner of two Edgar awards, is the author of nineteen previous novels, many of them "New York Times" bestsellers, including "Cimmaron Rose", Cadillac Jukebox", & "Sunset Limited". He & his wife divide their time between Missoula, Montana, & New Iberia, Louisiana.
(Publisher Provided)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
After stepping into stand-alone territory with Cimmaron Rose (1997), Burke choreographs a masterful return to the lush and brooding world of volatile New Iberia Sheriff's Deputy Dave Robicheaux (Cadillac Jukebox, 1996). This tale's strength lies in breathtaking, moody descriptive passages and incisive vignettes that set time, place and character. Burke's major themes, that the past is key to the present and that money buys power, pervade this mystery. The narrative, with more twists and bounces than a fish fighting a hook, rises from the violent, unsolved murder 40 years ago of union organizer Jack Flynn. The story encompasses at least eight disparate but interlocking subplots: the crooked money behind a movie directed by Flynn's son Cisco; the hold that ex-con Swede Boxleiter has on Cisco's photojournalist sister, Megan; Willie "Cool Breeze" Broussard's theft of a mob warehouse; his wife Ida's suicide 20 years ago; the shooting of two white brothers who raped a black woman; alcoholic Lisa Terrebonne's haunted childhood; her wealthy, arrogant father's ties to Harpo Scruggs, a vicious murderer; the post-Civil War killing by freed slaves of a Terrebonne servant. Hired assassins, snitches, lawmen and FBI agents weave through the novel. Dave and his partner Detective Helen Soileau find the connections, but Dave knows that in the ongoing class war, the worst criminals wield too much influence to pay for their crimes. In rich, dense prose, Burke conjures up bizarre, believable characters who inhabit vivid, spellbinding scenes in a multifaceted, engrossing plot. $300,000 ad/promo; author tour. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
After Burke's Texas sabbatical in Cimarron Rose (1997), it's back to the bayous with Dave Robicheaux, struggling as usual to right an old injustice while balancing the weight of the world on his back. Forty years after their labor-organizer father was crucified against a barn wall, Pulitzer photojournalist Megan Flynn and her filmmaker brother Cisco are back in New Iberia. Despite the sweeping changes in the South over the years, time seems to have stood still for most of the cast. Minor-league house thief Willie (Cool Breeze) Broussard and his jailer, Alex Guidry, are still at each other's throats over Guidry's ``rescue'' of Breeze's late wife from Harpo Delahoussey, the brute who carried her out of Breeze's house a generation ago. Harpo is long dead, but he's been reincarnated in his nephew Harpo Scruggs, the ex-Angola gun bull who now hires out as a contract killer. Landed souse Lila Terrabonne is frozen in time by the sexual abuse she can neither name nor forget. So the news that Cisco Flynn's been joined on location by his old orphanage buddy Swede Boxleiter, and that a Chinese drug triad, determined to stabilize its position before the British relinquish Hong Kong, is reaching down to New Iberia through New Orleans gangster Ricky (the Mouse) Scarlotti, does less to change the status quo than bring it to a boil. All of this will sound excruciatingly familiar to Burke's legion of fans, and indeed the novel might have been cast out of the author's stock company: There's the brutish lawman, the seductive returning native daughter, the Hollywood poseurs, the big-city gangsters, the browbeaten black victims, the corrupt power-mongersand, making his way through the middle of them all, thoughtful, hamstrung Dave, who doesn't so much solve this case as watch it unfold in a series of slow-motion flashbacks. On the other hand, the characters' buried secrets, floating just beneath the surface like so many hungry gators, remind you why reading even lesser Burke is like reading lesser Faulkner. ($300,000 ad/promo campaign; author tour)
Booklist Review
It looks and feels like nearly every other Dave Robicheaux novel, but if you look a little closer, feel a little deeper, you'll find something buried there that gives this tenth entry in the acclaimed series its own luster. Yes, there's a serious bad guy whom New Iberia, Louisiana, cop Dave must confront; yes, there's the distinctive Cajun ambience and worldview surrounding the action and driving Dave to both noble gestures and bursts of anger-fueled violence; and, yes, there's coffee and beignets at New Orleans' Cafedu Monde. Burke has never shied away from using the rhythms of formula as a kind of familiar backbeat; he knows that formula attracts more readers than it repels, but he also knows how important it is in a long-running series to keep the melody line fresh. The underlying conflict in this series has always been Dave and his Cajun way of life versus the modern world; this time, the focus turns toward the past. When several incidents in New Iberia recall the decades-old crucifixion of a labor organizer, Dave vows to solve the unsolved case and force the bayou community to confront its past and expunge its collective guilt. The trail backward also takes him into his own past and that of his dead parents, forcing some very personal stock-taking on those stormy nights when the rain pelts the tin roof of Dave's bait shop: "I never underestimated the power of the rain or the potential of the dead or denied them their presence in the world." Just as we should never underestimate Burke's ability to twist formula in new directions, always spicing the literary comfort food that is genre fiction with a distinctive new tang. (Reviewed April 15, 1998)0385488424Bill Ott
Library Journal Review
Burke switches publishers and moves from straightforward mystery in this story of the 40-year-old murder of a prominent labor leader, a case being reopened by his daughter. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.