James Lee Burke. The
Neon Rain. © 1987 Robicheaux 1
In this first novel about Dave Robicheaux he is a police lieutenant in
the homicide division of the New Orleans police. He finds a murdered mulatto girl in the
waters of a bayou. The sheriff for the
parish where she was found says she drowned and refuses to order an
autopsy. Robicheaux is convinced she was
murdered and thus begins a chain of events in which Robicheaux is waterboarded
and narrowly escapes being murdered and his brother Jimmy is shot in the head
by a professional hit man but survives. Robicheaux
is back and forth between a local criminal organization and a group of
adventurers making arms shipments to Central America. The latter group is run by a retired two star
and employs some former CIA special forces people. Robicheaux kills one in self defense and his
friend Clete Purcell takes $10,000 from someone to kill another. At the end of the book Robicheaux is reinstated
in the police force and then resigns.
Purcell takes off for Central America to work as a mercenary. There are no hints here about how Robicheaux
and Purcell rebuilt the friendship that was ruined by the hit but is such an
important element of books later in the series.
August 2014
.
James Lee Burke. Wayfaring
Stranger. © 2014 Weldon Holland is the grandson of a Texas
lawman who was the subject of one or more earlier novels. In 1934 at about age 15 he encounters Bonnie
and Clyde “camping out” on his grandpa’s ranch and never forgets it. As an army lieutenant in WW II, he saves the
life of his sergeant at the Battle of the Bulge. They end of behind enemy lines and wander
into an abandoned death camp. Among the
corpses they discover, Rosita, a Spanish Jew who had fled from Franco when the
Spanish revolution failed. She is still
alive but unlikely to survive without their help. They carry her with them until they find
shelter with a German farmer who has had it with the Nazis. When the US forces overrun the area, Rosita
is taken away to a hospital in a DP camp.
Weldon eventually finds her again in Marseilles just before she is to
embark for Israel. He persuades her to
marry him, maybe the smartest thing he ever did, and she accompanies him back
to Texas. The sergeant is a pretty
uncomplicated guy, but he knows welding and he recognizes that the technology
used to build German tanks was way ahead of anything in the US. He adapts it for welding pipelines and
persuades Weldon to become his partner in a pipeline construction company. They are too successful, and a wealthy oilman
sets out to take their company. His
method is to try to ruin their private lives.
He uses a movie contract to try to separate the sergeant from his wife,
and he sics the FBI on Rosita as a probable communist. Towards the end, things get pretty close to
unbelievable, but it’s a great read.
August 2014
.
Peter Mayle. The Corsican Caper. © 2014 Mayle
should stick to travel writing. Oleg
Vronsky, a Russian gazillionaire decides he wants a house in Marseilles that belongs Francis
Reboul, billionaire friend of farcical detective Sam Levitt and his farcical
partner Elena Morales. Vronsky is
willing to kill to get what he wants and hires a couple of Russian thugs to
knock off Reboul. Meanwhile we hear
about the lovely wines and delicious meals enjoyed by all. The murder is to be in Corsica. I couldn’t help think of the difference
between this Corsican caper and the one I just read in Daniel Silva’s The
English Girl . Apparently this
is the third installment in this gourmet detective series. You can forget it. August 2014
.
Daniel Silva. The English Girl. © 2013 (13th in this series). After Madeline Hart, a rising star in the
PM’s party and also his mistress, is kidnapped, the kidnappers demand demand
payment of €10 million within 7 days, or
they will kill Madeline and reveal her affair with the PM. A
senior officer in MI-5 asks Gabriel Allon, a famous Mossad agent, to find
Madeline. It’s not an official Mossad
operation, so Gabriel is on his own. He
flies to Corsica to hire some help. Then
it’s on to Provence where Madeline was abducted and he finds the house in which
she was being held. Gabriel and his
partner kill the people who had been holding Madeline, but she is no longer
there. When instructions come for
delivery of the money, the kidnappers demand that Gabriel be the one to deliver
it. After he delivers the money he runs
to pick up Madeline who is locked in the trunk of a car. The car explodes and the body in the trunk is
burned beyond recognition or forensic analysis.
Then things get interesting with a Mossad operation in Russia to go
after the kidnappers and a huge twist in Madeline’s story. August 2014
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