Black Cherry Blues
James Lee Burke, Author Little Brown and Company $17.95 (290p) ISBN 978-0-316-11699-2
Burke pits a land-hungry oil company against a Blackfeet Indian reservation in a stunning novel that takes detective fiction into new imaginative realms. His Cajun sleuth, Dave Robicheaux, an ex-New Orleans cop featured in two previous novels, attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, has recurrent nightmares about his murdered wife, and cares for an adopted El Salvadoran refugee girl. When two American Indian activists disappear, Robicheaux's dogged investigation not only sets him on a collision course with Mafia thugs and oil interests, but also leads him into a romance with Darlene American Horse, his ex-partner's girlfriend. All the main characters in this darkly beautiful, lyric saga carry heavy emotional baggage, and Robicheaux's sleuthing is a simultaneous exorcism of demons of grief, loss, fear, rage, vengeance. Burke's fictional terrain--stretching from the Louisiana bayous to Montana's red cliffs and pine-dotted hills--is uniquely his own, yet also a microcosm of a multi-ethnic America. He writes from the heart and the gut. 35,000 first printing; major ad/promo. (Sept.)
Details
Reviewed on: 09/01/1989
Release date: 09/01/1989
Genre: Fiction
Mass Market Paperbound - 384 pages - 9780380712045
Paperback - 387 pages - 9780753820315
Hardcover - 304 pages - 9780316116992
Hardcover - 358 pages - 9781574900705
Analog Audio Cassette - 2 pages - 9780671736101
Paperback - 384 pages - 9781409109501