Crime: The Tin Roof Blowdown By James Lee Burke Orion, 384pp. £12.99It will come as no surprise to James Lee Burke fans that his latest crime novel - the 16th in the popular Robicheaux series - is based in New Orleans during the period immediately after Hurricane Katrina.
The city has featured large in his work as a bawdy combination of mistress and hero, so he could hardly set another story in the city without dealing in some way with the cataclysmic 2004 event. Also, Burke's prose style veers towards the lyrical - though Robicheaux is as hard-boiled as any crime cop - and his themes frequently have a religious undertone, so a flood of such immense, even biblical proportions would have been too powerful an event to ignore.
The story takes place in the days immediately after the hurricane, when "we saw an American city turned into Baghdad". Into this chaos and lawlessness Burke's roughneck hero, Detective Dave Robicheaux, is called to solve the murder of two black men who were shot while on a looting spree with two other known criminals in a wealthy, white suburb. The two other young black men, the Melancon brothers, are now on the run. Their problem is they do not fully realise what they're running from because during the spree they unwittingly trashed the house of New Orleans's biggest, most vengeful mobster, Sidney Kovick, making away with not only drugs and cash but a large consignment of blood diamonds. It's not long before Clete Purcel, Robicheaux's sidekick, gets to explain to an increasingly petrified Bertrand Melancon just how much trouble he is in: "Hey, kid, if you stole anything from Sidney Kovick, mail it to him COD from Alaska, then buy a gun and shoot yourself. With luck, he won't find your grave."
Robicheaux's chief suspect for the murder of the looters is mild-mannered insurance man Otis Baylor. Readers know from the start that Baylor shot the men because as they paddled by his house in the flood water in the eerie moonlight, his daughter Melanie recognised them as the men who had raped her some years before. Intertwined with these fairly standard "cops and robbers" plots is Robicheaux's own, very personal quest to find his friend, "the junkie priest" Father LeBlanc, who has been missing since the hurricane.
BURKE'S NOVEL IS a powerful mix of near- journalistic reportage of the apocalyptic devastation in the wake of Katrina, undercut with a simmering rage at the corporate theft and government incompetence that made the clear-up such a difficult and divisive task. Ultimately, it's the powerful images he creates, not the crime yarn, that live in the mind's eye long after the many plot strands have been neatly tied up. It's the dead baby hanging in the branches of a tree, the fat black woman standing on the roof of the car waving for help until the water finally rises and she is submerged, the people clinging to their flimsy tin roofs while the filthy water laps at their feet. Burke puts the question that haunts every chapter in this powerful book in the mouth of an old man Robicheaux meets: "How come nobody came for us?"
Bernice Harrison is an Irish Times journalist
