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| The Tin Roof Blowdown (Dave Robicheaux Mysteries) | 
 enlarge | Author: James Lee Burke
Publisher: Pocket
Category: Book
List Price: $7.99
Buy Used: $1.47
You Save: $6.52 (82%)
New (39) Used (28) Collectible (1) from $1.47
Avg. Customer Rating:  133 reviews
Sales Rank: 7338
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 528
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 6.6 x 4.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 1416548505
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781416548508
ASIN: 1416548505
Publication Date: June 17, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: ex library nice reading copy
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Product Description
In the waning days of summer, 2005, a storm with greater impact than the bomb that struck Hiroshima peels the face off southern Louisiana.This is the gruesome reality Iberia Parish Sheriff's Detective Dave Robicheaux discovers as he is deployed to New Orleans. As James Lee Burke's new novel, The Tin Roof Blowdown, begins, Hurricane Katrina has left the commercial district and residential neighborhoods awash with looters and predators of every stripe. The power grid of the city has been destroyed, New Orleans reduced to the level of a medieval society. There is no law, no order, no sanctuary for the infirm, the helpless, and the innocent. Bodies float in the streets and lie impaled on the branches of flooded trees. In the midst of an apocalyptical nightmare, Robicheaux must find two serial rapists, a morphine-addicted priest, and a vigilante who may be more dangerous than the criminals looting the city. In a singular style that defies genre, James Lee Burke has created a hauntingly bleak picture of life in New Orleans after Katrina. Filled with complex characters and depictions of people at both their best and worst, The Tin Roof Blowdown is not only an action-packed crime thriller, but a poignant story of courage and sacrifice that critics are already calling Burke's best work.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 128 more reviews...
 An Elegy for New Orleans - Audiobook July 20, 2007
65 out of 76 found this review helpful
This is the most horrifying description of post Katrina that I've read to date. Burke's lush descriptions of the beauty of New Orleans and Louisiana bayou country are gone, replaced by "bodies wrapped tight like mummies in the gray and brown detritus left by the receding waters." There were parts I had to close my eyes to listen to because the sense of place was so vivid and I couldn't stand what I was seeing. There were times I found tears rolling down my face without notice.
The story is vintage Burke with a little bit of "is it mystical magic or not" thrown in amongst the good vs. evil that is the cross on which Burke hangs his stories. Burke's politics is more evident here than in other books, with Bush bashing, gratuitous remarks about Fox News, etc., jarringly interrupting the story's magic. But yet, the depth of Burke's anger at what happened in New Orleans, the failures and abandoment, certainly is well-grounded, and he vents that anger for all to see.
You can read the publisher's summary to get a feel for the story, but even if Burke was writing about the recipe for a fish stew, I'd read it and it would be wonderful. There is not a writer alive today that can put you in the scene so completely - the smells, the sights, the scent of the breeze, the color of sunlight and shade, the fragility of a human soul and its wounds...he's just amazing.
This is a wonderful, achingly sad, and horrific story of how Burke mourns the City of New Orleans and what it once was. Dave and Clete have lost their anchor and their childhoods.
I'd give it 10 stars if possible.
In the wake of Katrina redemption is found... July 17, 2007
42 out of 47 found this review helpful
Burke is the best around and he proves it again in the 16th Detective Robicheaux novel. He is able to capture the spirit of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast while telling a captivating story, and also illustrate much of what went wrong in our response to Hurricane Katrina--but he also shows what the human spirit can over come. Robicheaux's is investigating the shooting of one of two looters after they had looted the home of one of the city's most powerful mobsters. He Must find the surviving looter before the mobsters goons can get him. At the same time he is looking into the disappearance of a Ninth Ward priest who vanished while trying to save members of his congregation who were trapped by the hurricane flood waters. Burke is able to straddle the line between good and evil with each of his characters in such a way that the outcome is not foreseen and the gray areas are real. In the end though, the human spirit always shines through! Don't usually recommend other books but must mention Across the High Lonesome Very cool book about the modern American west!
The real deal... August 13, 2007
32 out of 34 found this review helpful
I think that James Lee Burke outdid himself with his latest Dave Robicheaux mystery, The Tin Roof Blowdown. Burke has often used the backdrop of New Orleans for his often dark and tortured books. But no fictional event could have provided as much material as Hurricane Katrina did in 2005.
Dave Robicheaux is a detective with the New Iberia Sheriff's Department, outside of New Orleans. When Katrina hits the Crescent City, all outside law enforcement agencies sent available officers to aid with the chaos that resulted. Robicheaux spent time in Viet Nam, but nothing he saw in war could have prepared him for what he witnessed in New Orleans. When he left Nam, he thought he would "never again have to witness the wide-scale suffering of innocent civilians, nor the betrayal and abandonment of our countrymen when they need us the most. But that was before Katrina. That was before a storm with greater impact than the bomb blast that struck Hiroshima peeled the face off southern Louisiana."
In The Tin Roof Blowdown, bounty hunter and Robicheaux friend, Cletus Purcel, is trying to pick up some bail skips right before Katrina hits. But the same men that Purcel is after end up being wanted for a host of other crimes as well. Not only that, but they've stolen a fortune from the top Mafioso in New Orleans. So not only are the cops looking for them, but some unsavory characters are as well. How these characters all converge is vintage Burke.
One of the things I like best about Burke's books is that he makes the locale a major player in his stories. He has a love/hate relationship with New Orleans and calls her the Whore of Babylon. When driving through the ruined streets, he muses "New Orleans had been a song, not a city. Like San Francisco, it didn't belong to a state; it belonged to a people." He describes southern Louisiana with lush brushstrokes, from the bayous to the wildlife to the marshes. But where he outdoes himself in The Tin Roof Blowdown is in his descriptions of post-Katrina New Orleans. No pictures that you may have seen will accurately tell the story of what happened to this historic city as well as Burke does in narrative form. It is that vivid and that horrible.
James Lee Burke tends to publish a new Robicheaux every July. Fortunately for us, while prolific in his writing, he isn't publishing books just to meet a deadline. The Tin Roof Blowdown is the real deal.
 Baghdad, North Guatemala September 4, 2007
19 out of 21 found this review helpful
Let me say upfront, that I like J.L.Burke's writing, and his basic attitude to life and the world. When I give this current bestseller only 3 stars, it comes first of all from a spirit of contrariness (if all others give 5 stars, I must find something wrong..., sorry), but also from a sense of dissatisfaction with too many elements in the story.
The book starts with a very strong short chapter on Dave's Vietnam nightmares, which makes you think of the parallells to the Katrina experience: manifold death in a tropical setting of chaos. It follows up on this introduction with many equally strong chapters on the hurricane and and its aftermath: the destruction, the violence, the neglect, the hopelessness.
But then it loses steam by focusing on a crime narrative that is just too overloaded with cliches and with the slightly worn out patterns of the Dave Robicheaux series. Sorry to say, but as much as I like the guy Dave, the ex-alcoholic liberal catholic with the permanently changing and permanently endangered family and the outbursts of violent behaviour, I think his sidekick Clete is too much of a compromise to the requirements of the action genre. Also, the habit of creating a new super evil monster, here called Ronald (my name is Ronald, what is yours?) again and again is a bit tiring. Same goes for the repetitive versions of the dominant gangster bosses with the human touch and the normal wives. Why is it, by the way, that Dave seems to know all gangsters from either childhood or from Vietnam? Is Louisiana that small? (As Clete said previously, Louisiana is not part of the US, but of Central America.)
Luckily in this volume of the series Burke has not indulged in his other repetitive topic, the decadent old money family with a French name.
Burke's tendency to racial fairness has also caused him to create a rather unbelievable version of a bad guy's remorse: the man Bertrand, rapist, robber, killer, is just over the top in his clumsily repentant attempts at atonement.
All in all, if you stop reading half way through, this is a very good fictional account of Katrina. If you read it all the way, it loses due to its overload with cliches.
 "Evil sometimes comes in a package that has no label." July 17, 2007
14 out of 27 found this review helpful
The terminally angst-ridden Dave Robicheaux, a detective in New Iberia Parish, Louisiana, and his close pal, Clete Purcel, team up in another of Burke's riveting novels, one made all the more relevant by the recent tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. Both men have seen too much of the world to believe in miracles, but are unable to give up entirely on human nature, allowing for the dark side so evident in the denizens of New Iberia Parish. After the devastation of Katrina, neither man is prepared for the parade of horrors that changes the face of New Orleans, all her flaws exposed in nature's indifferent assault. Clete is in pursuit of a dying junkie priest last seen trying to rescue people trapped in the attic of a church, while Dave is called into service in an overwhelmed NOPD. To that end, he is sent to investigate the sniper shooting of four young black looters, one killed outright, another paralyzed by a shot through the throat. The young men have copped a once-in-a-lifetime score, the secret stash in a wealthy man's New Orleans home.
These tangential events connect a number of disparate characters in a complicated maze of hunter and hunted: a decent insurance agent whose daughter was brutally raped; a blowhard vigilante who patrols his flooded neighborhood with his drunken friends; and a powerful businessman who has risen from the wrong side of the tracks to a position of social prominence, posing for photo ops with politicians and has-been celebrities. The fly in the ointment is an intimidating, unctuous outsider, Ron Bledsoe, supposedly tracking the stolen goods the looters found, but with an agenda that includes a serious threat to Robicheaux's daughter. And one elusive young man holds the key to it all. With all that demands immediate attention in the aftermath of Katrina, Dave concentrates on the shooting, while Purcel lurks around the edges of an increasing bloodbath, the priest always out of reach. In true Burke form, Robicheaux inhabits this post-Katrina novel with the nostalgia and grief born of senseless destruction and the aftermath of outrageous bureaucratic blunders, applying himself to a crime that defies understanding, at the same time confronting a threat to his family.
The images are painful, a great city brought low not only by nature but the criminal manipulation of greedy profiteers. Their psyches haunted by ghosts of the past, Robicheaux and Purcel exemplify good, but flawed men who have witnessed too much to walk away unscathed. Robicheaux carries the weight of reality and the wisdom of experience, making peace with violence without losing his soul, but distraught at the loss of his beloved New Orleans: "The destruction of New Orleans was an ongoing national tragedy and probably an American watershed in the history of political cynicism." Surrounded by opportunists, victims and the ill-intentioned, Dave comes face to face with the kind of evil that exists only to destroy. This novel beautifully illustrates the inevitable degeneration of the Big Easy long before Katrina, from the reduction of federal funds in the 1980s and the introduction of crack cocaine into the poorest communities, changing the complexion of crime and the balance of power. Robicheaux is left to deliberate the devastating effect on both fronts as Louisiana is mauled by the massive force of Katrina. Luan Gaines/2007.
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