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Pegasus Descending: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (Dave Robicheaux Mysteries)
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Pegasus Descending: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (Dave Robicheaux Mysteries)by James Lee Burke
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful: Master story teller!, July 21, 2006 Reviewer:Bill Pullman "Book reviewer" (USA) - As most of you who read my reviews know, I have very eclectic tastes--Everything from trash to classics. I could never review everything I read, but I was looking through my reviews the other day and saw I had never reviewed a James Lee Burke Novel and he is one of my favorites! So here it is. When it comes to describing a scene or a character Burke is one of the masters. His books are as much about place as plot (though the plots are always wonderfully conceived!). And his Dave Robicheaux novels usually find him at the top of his game. I have never been to the south but I feel like I have been deep fried in southern culture and place after reading one of his books. Robicheaux is a surviving alcoholic, off the bottle for years now but still shadowed by his past. Trish Klein is a friend's daughter who has disappeared after ripping off a local mobster. Years ago Robicheaux watched as Trish's father--and Dave's best friend--was murdered. Robicheaux was too drunk to prevent the killing, and carrying this guilt he must now try and save the daughter. As usual this is a complex and layered story with great characters, and like real life, answers do not come easily. I also have to recommend "Across the High Lonesome" gritty, funny, and a real slice of life from another great story teller.
From Publishers Weekly
Drawing on classical antecedents, bestseller Burke peoples his 15th Dave Robicheaux novel (after 2004's Crusader's Cross) with his usual assortment of near mythic characters, demonstrating how our everyday lives are beset with age-old, universal dilemmas. New Iberia, La., detective Dave Robicheaux, for whom redemption has become a lifelong pursuit, suits up once again to tilt against villains both real and in his own troubled psyche. Twenty-five years earlier, the young alcohol-soaked cop witnessed his friend and fellow Vietnam vet, Dallas Klein, executed by a group of cold-blooded thugs. He was unable to intercede because he was plastered. Now, a young grifter who may be the victim's daughter, Trish Klein, has appeared in New Iberia, passing counterfeit money and baiting Whitey Bruxal, the aging mobster responsible for Dallas's death. Meanwhile, Dave investigates the apparent suicide of pretty young co-ed Yvonne Darbonne. Are the two cases linked? Dave thinks so, and he enlists longtime loose-cannon sidekick Clete Purcel to prove it. With peerless naturalistic descriptions and lush, metaphysical imagery, Burke creates another challenging morality play for his flawed, everyman hero. (July)
Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
In James Lee Burke's novels, the past in never farther away than the ripples on the bayou outside Dave Robicheaux's New Iberia, Louisiana, home. This time it's Robicheaux's dark personal history--when the detective "was still going steady with Jim Beam straight up and a beer back"--that interferes with the tranquil present for newly married Dave. When Trish Klein turns up in New Iberia, it doesn't take long for Robicheaux to realize she is the daughter of his old friend, Dallas, who died in an armored-car robbery that Dave witnessed but was too drunk to stop. To make amends, Robicheaux must solve the several interconnected murders that track back to the man behind the armored-car hit. Everything that makes this series so compelling--the elegiac, seductively lyrical prose; the complex character of Robicheaux; the lovingly evoked bayou setting-- is here in abundance, and if it doesn't galvanize into something quite as special as the last episode, Crusader's Cross (2005), that's only because we've come to expect so much from this series. The fact remains that no serious reader of hard-boiled fiction should ever miss a moment of Dave Robicheaux in action. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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