James Lee Burke is what fellow writers call a wordsmith. He can make your eyes water with a lyrical description of tropical rain falling on a Louisiana bayou: “I love the mist hanging in the trees,” he tells us in ROBICHEAUX (Simon & Schuster, $27.99), “a hint of wraiths that would not let heavy stones weigh them down in their graves, the raindrops clicking on the lily pads, the fish rising as though in celebration.” But in the next breath, he’ll offer a comprehensive account of an excruciating death by torture: “The guy who did him took his time.” And to satisfy our appetite for Southern eccentricity, he’ll introduce us to great characters like Baby Cakes Babineau and Pookie the Possum Domingue.
Dave Robicheaux, the narrator of this robust regional series, is an Iberia Parish sheriff’s detective with the melancholy air of a man who occasionally sees the hollow-eyed ghosts of the Confederate dead. Haunted by his own violent past, Robicheaux keeps trying to redeem himself through good works; but when he falls off the wagon, as he does here in a spectacular way, he thinks he might be capable of committing murder. But he’s not in the same class as a contract killer named Chester Wimple (“Sometimes people call me Smiley”).
Like most of Burke’s plots, this one has roots in Louisiana history, a gumbo of “misogamy and racism and homophobia,” not to mention “demagoguery” and “self-congratulatory ignorance.” Mob figures like Fat Tony Nemo look tough, but they have nothing on up-and-coming politicians like Jimmy Nightingale, eager to follow in the footsteps of his flamboyantly crooked predecessors. Burke has no inclination to romanticize gangsters, no matter how well groomed: “They were brutal, stupid to the core, and had the visceral instincts of medieval peasants armed with pitchforks.” Rather, he pays homage to the fallen dead like Lt. Robert S. Broussard, a Civil War hero whose sword gets into the hands of a crime boss. In rescuing this artifact, Robicheaux bares his bleeding heart for “La Louisiane, the love of my life, the home of Jolie Blon and Evangeline and the Great Whore of Babylon, the place for which I would die.”
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Witty, stylish and a bit of a rogue — that’s what people said about Richard Nash, known as Beau, the notorious dandy who transformed the English city of Bath into “the 18th-century equivalent of Vegas.” The same might be said of Peter Lovesey, whose elegant mysteries pay tribute to the past glories of this beautiful city. In BEAU DEATH (Soho Crime, $27.95), a demolition crew unearths the remains of a bewigged gentleman in period dress, setting off gossip that Nash has been found — murdered. Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond accepts this theory until he discovers the desiccated corpse was wearing modern-day underwear.
There’s always a whiff of Restoration comedy about Lovesey’s cunning plots, which make a point of featuring shrewd women like the drolly named Georgina Dallymore, whose ample comedic gifts make her a figure fit for a Congreve comedy and the perfect companion for Diamond.
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If you find it significant that tortellini can be easier to eat than linguine or fettuccine, THE BODY IN THE CASKET (Morrow, $25.99) is your kind of mystery. Katherine Hall Page, who has written almost two dozen culinary mysteries, has come up with another smart twist on her cozy formula featuring Faith Fairchild, a minister’s wife and keen-eyed amateur detective from suburban Massachusetts. Faith’s catering firm, Have Faith in Your Kitchen, has been hired for a weekend party by Max Dane, a once-famous Broadway producer celebrating his 70th birthday. But what he really wants to hire is Faith’s sleuthing talent, because he strongly suspects that one of his guests wants to kill him. The mechanics of the murder mystery are well set up and executed, but what you’re hungry for is what’s on the menu. This time, Faith is starting off with “Fallen Angel” cocktails, then moving along to deviled eggs and an apple-potato dish called “Himmel und Erde.” The main course, lobster pasta fra diavolo, is followed by an angel food cake, from a recipe that calls for “nine large eggs” and a mountain of sugar. Sounds divine.
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Where better to set a gangster novel than big, bad, brawling Chicago during Prohibition? The way Ray Celestin tells it in DEAD MAN’S BLUES (Pegasus Crime, $25.95), everyone in the city was corrupt, from the mayor, Big Bill Thompson, to the 25,000 soda shop owners who ran speakeasies in their back rooms. The most colorful characters were mobsters like Al Capone and his rival, Bugs Moran, so-called because he was certifiably “buggy, crazy, homicidally violent and not very clever.” As he did in his first novel, “The Axeman,” which was set in New Orleans, Celestin perfectly captures the jazzy street rhythms of this proudly pugnacious city and its peculiar characters. His authorial gaze encompasses everything from a flower-festooned gangster’s funeral (with “a casket costing more than most people’s houses”) to a golf game featuring Capone; his hit man, Machine Gun Jack McGurn; and the mayor of suburban Burnham. Which is a lot funnier than the funeral.
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