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    Creole Belle: A Dave Robicheaux Novel
    Creole Belle: A Dave Robicheaux Novel
    Creole Belle: A Dave Robicheaux Novel
    Audiobook18 hours

    Creole Belle: A Dave Robicheaux Novel

    Written by James Lee Burke

    Narrated by Will Patton

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    “America’s best novelist” James Lee Burke returns with another New York Times bestselling entry in the Dave Robicheaux thriller series (The Denver Post).

    Set against the events of the Gulf Coast oil spill, rife with “the menaces of greed and violence and man-made horror” (The Christian Science Monitor), Creole Belle finds Dave Robicheaux languishing in a New Orleans recovery unit since surviving a bayou shoot-out. The detective’s body is healing; it’s his morphine-addled mind that conjures spectral visions of Tee Jolie Melton, a young woman who in reality has gone missing. An iPod with an old blues song left by his bedside turns Robicheaux into a man obsessed…And as oil companies assign blame after an epic disaster threatens the Gulf’s very existence, Robicheaux unearths connections between tragedies both global and personal—and faces down forces that can corrupt and destroy the best of men.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateJul 17, 2012
    ISBN9781442349032
    Author

    James Lee Burke

    James Lee Burke is a New York Times bestselling author, two-time winner of the Edgar Award, and the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in Fiction. He has authored forty novels and two short story collections. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

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    Reviews for Creole Belle

    4.5/5

    76 ratings20 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Creole Belle is very much Clete's story, a first for James Lee Burke. I saw it coming in previous stories, and Creole Belle was everything I could have hoped for. Full of contradiction and desperate choices. Nothing in the world of Dave Robicheaux is black and white. They live in a world of gray.Dave contemplates death much more these days. He and Clete think about death, their age, wondering if they're irrelevant, and recall the New Orleans of their youth with a sense of loss akin to mourning. The troubles and pains of their pasts do not taint their memories of New Orleans, and the city of their childhoods remains like a laughing infant, joyous and thrilled with its own being.The chemical traces remaining from the oil well blowout are like a stain reminding them of what they've lost. Dave mourns the loss of the wetlands, marshes, and bayou of his youth, and resents that the loss comes at a deliberate hand.The story is as involved as ever, building layers over the characters, bringing some to the end their lives led them to. I did have a few moments of terror when I thought Mr. Burke had taken from us one character whose loss I could not abide. If I have any complaint, it's that I missed Will Patton's voice. I read this book, though I usually listen to the audiobook. Patton has become the voice of Dave Robicheaux for me. A few favorite quotes:"No matter how it played out, my vote would always remain with those who'd had their souls shot out of a cannon and who no longer paid much heed to the judgment of the world."-- Dave Robicheaux in one sentence. "Does it make sense that the same species that created Athenian democracy and the Golden Age of Pericles and the city of Florence also gifted us with the Inquisition and Dresden and the Nanking massacre?"-- Dave sees contradiction as intrinsic to the human condition, even though he doesn't always understand it. "Evil men feared and hated Clete Purcel because they knew he was unlike them. They feared him because they knew he put principle ahead of self-interest, and they feared him because he would lay down his life for his best friend. I think Ben Jonson would have liked and understood Clete and would not have been averse to saying that, like his friend William Shakespeare, Clete was not of an age but for all time."-- a fitting description for the man at the center of this story, and a testament to the admiration and love Dave Robicheaux has for his friend.
    • 4/5
      Robicheaux and Clete are back with Clete?s daughter, Gretchen Horowitz, a ?pistol? of a character. Although this is a traditionall Robicheaux story ? rich, corrupt southern family with a spoiled daughter ruining tranquil Louisiana - I'm a sucker for Mr. Burke's verbal artwork, rapid dialogue and borderline uncomfortable violence. The five hundred pages were an easy read with "good" characters you wished were your neighbors (honorable, self-sufficient and no pretense) and "evil" characters you're glad are a thousand miles away..
    • 5/5
      James Lee Burke does something better than any crime fiction writer around today: he creates believable, self-contained worlds in which the outlandish things that happen to his good guys seem entirely plausible. And, boy do crazy things happen to Dave Robicheaux, Clete Purcell, and those closest to them. But in Burke's little corners of southwest Louisiana and remote Montana, it all makes a certain kind of sense.As Creole Belle begins, Dave is still hospitalized, slowly recovering from the near-death experience he and Clete experienced at the end of the previous series novel, The Glass Rainbow. In the hospital, Dave, who is often surrounded by visitors from his past (be they long dead or not), is surprised by a visit - and the gift of an iPod with some special songs on it - from Tee Jolie Melton, a young woman he knows. There are just two problems: Tee Jolie disappeared several weeks earlier, not to be seen since, and no one can hear the special iPod songs but Dave.Even when he finally leaves the hospital, Dave continues to get phone calls from Tee Jolie in the middle of the night. Sensing that something is terribly wrong, he and Clete start asking questions. When Tee Jolie's sister is found encased in a huge block of ice floating in the warmish waters of the Gulf of Mexico, it all suddenly becomes too real. Someone badly wants Dave and Clete to back off and will do anything it takes to kill their investigation - and them.James Lee Burke, at age 76, is still very much in peak writing form. His Robicheaux novels, in particular, are as good as ever, and Burke has even added an intriguing new character to the mix here who will be one of the key characters in his soon to be released Light of the World. In Burke's view, the fight between good and evil is not a black and white one. He focuses, instead, on all the gray areas where the bad guys sometimes show a tiny sliver of a heart and the good guys are forced to use bad-guy tactics in the name of justice. Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcell pride themselves on protecting those incapable of protecting themselves - and if the system cannot do it, they do whatever it takes to get the job done.Bottom Line: Read this book. Read this series. Read James Lee Burke.
    • 3/5
      This is the newest Dave Robicheaux mystery hot off the press. Unfortunately I found that Burke's writing did not justify one of his longest books at 544 pages. There was a lot of more of the same again and again that slowed the pace of the story. I am a great Robicheaux fan and have read all of the books in the series, several more than once. I do not see myself reading this book again.I missed his wife Molly. She made very brief appearances in this book and she is one of my favorite characters. Alafair was prominent and got a buddy with the appearance of Clete's daughter, Gretchen Horowitz. Gretchen was Clete's daughter, a character whose complexity stretched the limits of believability. The whole story of Clete's fatherhood just didn't convince me that it could have happened.One of the major bad guys in the story was a 90 year old Nazi who had worked with Adolf Eichmann. His apprentice was a man who was both his son and his grandson. They are involved in an oil spill that is ruining south Louisiana. I felt that Burke had used that plot line one too many times.Another carry over was the phantom paddle boat waiting to carry Dave and Clete to the other side. Clete saw it often as he spat up blood from a bullet left in his chest from the shoot out at the end of The Glass Rainbow.At the end the action and suspense got lost in over the top gimmicks like an Iron Maiden. I have read a lot of very good reviews of this book and you always need to read it for yourself but I am going to stop at two and one-half stars.
    • 4/5
      A dependable read. The character Gretchen morph's to quickly but an enjoyable read if a little long. You know Burke's running out of villains when he's going after ex-nazis.
    • 2/5
      It took me much too long to get through this one, and I can't say it was really worth the time I spent. Burke's mastery of language is still very evident here, in his exquisite descriptions of landscape, wildlife, weather phenomenon, and all sorts of natural beauty. Unfortunately he is just as skillful at describing what knives, bullets and weighted saps do to the human body, and there is just too much of that kind of thing in Creole Belle. Burke has always used violence to illustrate the evil side of human nature; even his protagonists could never be described as peace-loving. But since Hurricane Katrina and more recently the oil rig blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico, Burke has given us less and less of the beauty and more of the ugliness. I assume he is representing what he sees happening to his beloved Louisiana lowlands, but he has lost his feel for story and humanity, although he continues to pay lip service to the latter. There is damned little actual story here---the evildoers are evil indeed, but what they are up to (beyond killing and maiming) is awfully vague. It's something to do with why that oil rig blew up and poisoned the Gulf waters, ruined the oyster beds and crippled the shrimping industry, but Burke never bothers to explain it much beyond that. I'm tired of hearing about what a "good man" Clete Purcel is. You know better than that, Mr. Burke---you can't ask us to believe it just because his best friend says so, you have to show us that it's true. After 19 books, I'm still trying to "get" Purcel. A good man can have bad impulses, but he finds the strength to resist them, at least some of the time. Clete never does. I'm tired of Burke treating his female characters as dispensable, unless it suits him to have Robicheaux rescue them from dire circumstances. I'm tired of finding no one to admire in his books. Maybe I'm getting old and cranky. Maybe I've just read too much. Or maybe Burke should have let Dave and Clete die in that mythic moment at the end of The Glass Rainbow. It's almost impossible to suspend my disbelief any more about just how much brutal insult their aging bodies can take and recover from, let alone the superhuman feats they perform with bullets in their backs. My daughter has suggested that I go back and read one of Burke's earlier novels in the series, one that I particularly enjoyed, to get the bad taste out of my mouth. That may be a good idea. But I'll have to wait a while.April 2013
    • 4/5
      If through some trick of genetic engineering you could combine the writing DNA of Hammett, Faulkner, and Tennessee Williams, James Lee Burke would be the product. His hero, Dave Robicheaux, is an updated version of Hammett?s Sam Spade, a scarred and battered warrior desperately, wearily clinging to righteousness in a world where virtue has become relative. His cast of characters are lifted straight from a Tennessee Williams play, each of them a complex, heartbreaking composite of virtue and moral corruption ? the only thing that varies is the extent to which each of them forges an uneasy balance between these essential elements of their nature. And his plots are Faulknerian in scope, gothic studies of good and evil laced with Biblical themes, set against the moral corruption of the American South, communicated in prose whose beauty provides a constant ironic counterpoint to plots rife with brutality and moral horror. In this outing, Dave is recovering from wounds sustained in a horrific shootout with villains in the heart of a mist-shrouded bayou (an event recounted in The Glass Rainbow, the prequel to this novel) when he receives a call from a young woman in trouble ? because isn?t that how most chivalric quests begin? Soon he and his partner Clete Purcell find themselves entangled with a Southern aristocrat who may or may not be a Nazi war criminal, a bigoted ex-sheriff, corrupt oil company executives, an albino with a taste for medieval cruelty, a treacherous Southern belle, and a Miami hitman (hitwoman?) in a tale that involves stolen/forged artwork, human trafficking, drugs, and oil industry malfeasance in the wake of the BP oil spill. Between alternating scenes of breathtaking beauty and equally breathtaking violence Burke explores a variety of disturbing themes, the chief of which seem to be: To what extent are evil means (war, violence) justified to accomplish virtuous ends? Is ?reality? merely a personal construct? Do we ever finish paying for the mistakes we make? Are there some actions that can never be redeemed? Much like a Hammett novel, it?s probably better if you don?t spend too much time trying to analyze the plot, because it has more twists and turns than the channels of a Louisiana bayou. (Has anyone ever figured out who killed the chauffeur in Hammett?s The Big Sleep? Does anyone care?) In fact, I get the sense that some of the plotlines are deliberately left hanging ? that we?ll be seeing some of these baddies again in Robicheaux?s next outing. Better to just sit back and let Burke?s gorgeously sensual prose sweep you along for the ride. And if the last three horrific chapters of the tale don?t leave you exhausted and emotionally drained, then the Greeks were all wrong about the whole ?catharsis? thing. I find it astonishing that after 18 Robicheaux novels, James Lee Burke is still capable of such luminescent writing and wrenching storytelling. I remain convinced that if this guy were writing anything but crime fiction, universities would be teaching Burke alongside the works of Faulker, O?Connor, Walker, Welty and other great Southern novelists.
    • 4/5
      Dave Robicheaux is recuperating from a wound in his last case. He's been given morphine for the pain and as an alcoholic, he's having difficulty managing his medicine.One night a woman comes to see him after hours. Her name is Tee Jolie and she brings Dave an i-Pod so he can listen to music. She tells him that she is pregnant from a man who isn't divorced.In the morning Dave isn't sure if it was just a dream, then he sees the I-Pod. Later he learns that Tee Jolie is missing and he hurries to get better so he can investigate.As he does, he comes in contact with Pierre Dupree, an artist, and Pierre's grandfather, who has a questionable past concerning his whereabouts in WWII.When some men try to harm Dave, they are soon dealt with and then Dave learns that a contract killer has come to New Orleans. His friend, Clete Purcel meets a woman in a bar and thinks this might be his daughter from a woman he had a brief romance with, years ago. He also wonders if she is the contract killer and maybe, sent to harm someone Clete loves.Burke's writing is always imaginative and eloquently descriptive. The characters are unique and memorable. Dave and Clete have an enduring friendship that rates with any characters in literature.This is a novel not to be missed and adds to Burke's legend as one of our best writers.
    • 4/5
      I read this book just after visiting Louisiana in the fall of 2014. The trip was a retirement present for my husband and I and we truly loved the time we spent there. I?ve been reading Burke?s books for many years and his description of Louisiana was certainly one of the factors in deciding to go there. We spent time in New Orleans and in the New Iberia area both of which figure in this book. We discovered a little bookshop in Pirate?s Alley just half a block from Jackson Square that was housed in a building in which Faulkner lived. In fact, I bought Burke?s latest book in that shop. On page 13 of this book there is the following paragraph:His two visitors had parked their car on Decatur and walked up Pirates Alley, past the small bookshop that once was the apartment of William Faulkner, then had mounted the stairs of Clete?s building, where one of them banged loudly on the door with the flat of his fist.How about that for synchronicity?This book follows after The Glass Rainbow which ended with a gunfight on the banks of the Bayou Teche between Dave Robicheaux, Clete Purcel and a gang of bad guys. I wasn?t sure if Dave and Clete had survived but this book is proof that they did. They thought that they had killed the bad guys but it seems there is a never ending supply of them. Another group figures in this book and they are as evil as can be. The disastrous blow-out on the oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico is only one of the things this group is responsible for. They are probably also responsible for kidnapping young girls and may be torturing them and injecting them with drugs. One young girl, Tee Jolie Melton, has managed to contact Dave but she is so incoherent she cannot describe where she is. She doesn?t think she is in any danger but her sister, Blue, showed up in a block of ice on a sandbar in the Gulf of Mexico. Dave is still recovering from the wounds he received but he is determined to find Tee Jolie.His best friend, Clete, has his own problems relating to that visit by the two men referenced in the paragraph quoted above. They claim that they have a 20 year old IOU that Clete signed and never paid so he owes a lot of money. Clete knows it is a bogus claim but he has to put a stop to the harassment. Then, while he is following one of the men to the Algiers district, he witnesses his assassination by a contract killer. You might think that would take care of Clete?s problems but it is actually the start of a new one. The killer is Clete?s illegitimate daughter, Gretchen Horowitz, although Gretchen does not know Clete is her father nor have they ever met.All these factors come together as the novel progresses but I have to say that I didn?t think the plotting was as good as previous works. At almost 600 pages I think it could have done with some judicious editing. Nevertheless, Burke?s less than optimum writing is better than the best efforts of most other writers. Judge for yourself.
    • 5/5
      Creole Belle. James Lee Burk. 2012. Burke?s writing just gets better and better. Dave Robicheaux and his buddy Clete run into the usual bunch of worthless scum as they try to find out what happened to Tee Jolie a young woman who is missing. The hunt intensifies when Tee Jolie?s sister is found floating in a block of ice in the river. Robicheaux and Clete have inner demons to fight related to events that happened in Vietnam and when they were policemen in New Orleans. Robicheaux?s musing on man?s depravity and on moral choices that have to be made are icing on the cake for me. Violent, suspenseful and beautifully written, this book makes me want to go back and read the older novels in this series.
    • 4/5
      When ever you start a JLB book you instantly become aware that you are reading something special. Burke is one of the top writers of his time and his books transcend genre. In this latest installment Dave squares off against a family with ties back to Nazi Germany that are involved an oil plot. As with most of his books the plot is secondary to character development and the beauty of language. As always Burke explores the theme's of violence that is inherent in people. He also continues to visit how the sins of the father are conveyed to the son. I highly recommend.
    • 5/5
      While Dave Robichaeux was in a recovery unit in New Orleans, a mysterious woman named Tee Jolie Melton paid him a visit, giving him an iPod with the song "Creole Belle" on it. Since then, Dave has become obsessed with the song and the woman who gave it to him. When he goes searching dor her, he discovers that her sister has been murdered.
    • 3/5
      I had mentally applauded James Lee Burke for appearing to kill off Clete and Dave at the end of The Glass Rainbow - I was sad, but also thought it was time for them to have a more or less graceful exit from the stage. Mr. Burke has let them age throughout the series and I was beginning to wonder what trouble they might find themselves in that they might not be able to survive. In the latest book, Creole Belle, it is apparent that this was not the plan.I will take a ride with James Lee Burke anywhere he wants to go. I love his writing, his stories, and his characters - they've all been like family to me as I've read about them for so many years. Tin Roof Blowdown was Burke's paen to Katrina and the damage wrought by her and by a neglectful government at all levels. It was beautiful, impassioned, and one of the few Katrina books I've been able to read (it all still makes me too angry and sad). Creole Belle is about the post-Katrina world, but in particular the post BP oil spill world - a pean to a way of life that is quickly vanishing into the black tar left behind by oil company carelessness and by the state's own dependence on the industry for much of its livelihood.I liked Creole Belle. It's poignant and contains many of the elements I expect from Mr. Burke's novels - the Bobbsey Twins, the sense of place, the mystery of the haves and the have-nots, the desire to right wrongs and the regret that sometimes you just can't win. It works as a thriller, but ultimately feels a lot more like a diatribe against the outside forces the Louisiana has allowed to come in and rape its beauty. This isn't the best novel Mr. Burke's ever written, but I'd recommend the worst James Lee Burke novel over dozens of others. If you haven't read this series, you're really missing out.
    • 5/5
      I love this series. Dave and Clet are awesome characters, delving into the crimes as well as their personal demons.
    • 4/5
      Beauty and brutality. The atmosphere that you can cut with a knife. The introspection. The wisdom and the outrage.
      Thank you, Mr. Burke.
    • 3/5
      A bit all over the place, not his usual crisp writing style but still good.
    • 1/5
      I keep thinking that one of the new books will be as good as those written earlier in Burke's career. This one doesn't make the grade. It is a boring re-hash of the same tired philosophico-babble that has characterized his last several books. Both Dave and Clete wallow in their depression; Alafair is headed in the same direction. The story sparks interest here and there; but between these intellectual peaks are pages of what could be kindly described as introspection and historical background.
    • 5/5
      5 stars - for the genre. I am a big fan of the series, and I think this one moved the series along nicely. I listened to the audio book, and it was very well done. A long time ago I read a NY Times review of the series and it spoke of the "masculine prose" of Burke. Indeed. Other book in the series convey a bit more of the Louisiana environment - but the musings of the characters "hit home" to me. If you haven't read any in the series - start earlier, although this one could stand alone. There is a great history of character development in the series. Another caveat - the main characters are veterans of the Vietnam war. As I am of that generation, their struggles are very real to me. I thought it was interesting that a few of the younger characters had experiences in later wars that our country just can't seem to stay out of. I think Burke has created characters that represent the horrific experiences of those who have gone to war and how those experiences will always affect their lives. This is a good one.
    • 5/5
      I can't believe that this Dave Robicheaux series still has such a hold on me. ?How can I possibly continue to be so enthralled when this is the nineteenth one!? ?I know that a big piece of that is that I am from the southern United States, although I have lived in California for the last 53 or so years. ?My extended family remains in the south and I certainly have strong feelings of nostalgia. ?Burke's writing puts you right there in the scene. ?You can feel the humidity, see the lush, lush vegetation, and experience the sounds and smells of New Orleans and the surrounding small towns. ?Dave himself is one of those men who plays both the role of the tough guy and the gentle, highly principled man who many women find so appealing. ?OK, that I find appealing. ?His personal struggles are a large part of what appeal to me in this series of novels. ?I keep wondering if I won't begin to find the books somewhat repetitive as many of the themes are in every book, e.g. his struggle with alcohol and PTSD from his experiences in Vietnam. ?But then, those ARE often life long struggles in real life. ?I'm hearing a lot lately about elderly men e.g. in the assisted living facility where my mom lives, whose PTSD gets worse in their old age and some seem to regress. ? ?Breaks my heart to see what we do to our women and men by sending them to war. ?Next to the tv series Rescue Me, about firefighters who experienced 9/11 and their recovery difficulties, Burke draws perhaps the most realistic picture of the experience of PTSD, certainly one of the best I have read. ?Yes this is a mystery, murder novel, but there is a lot to learn about the history of Louisiana and about war, even tho the novel is set in the present. ?I think this is Burke's best yet and give it five stars.P.S. If you are interested in the topic of PTSD I also highly recommend [[Doug Peacock's]] book [Walking It Off: ?a Veteran's Chronicle of War and Wilderness]. ?It's a story of one man's method of using walking in wilderness to deal with his PTSD. ?Great story and wonderful time spent in the wild with bears! ?Peacock is a friend of Ed Abbey, for fans of Abbey.
    • 5/5
      This is the darkest of the Dave Robicheaux novels, at least up to the time of its publication in 2012, written by James Lee Burke. Once again, Detective Robicheaux of the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department and his best friend and fellow warrior against injustice Clete Purcell survive a horrendously violent battle against the forces of crime and depravity in the bayou country of southern Louisiana, but they are both badly wounded, physically and spiritually, in the fight. Dave and Clete, both Vietnam War vets, are now facing constant reminders of their own mortality. In this tale, they also have to worry about their independent-minded adult daughters while trying to deal with a malignant family of power and wealth involved in the BP oil rig explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.