The Glass Rainbow (Dave Robicheaux #18)

Excerpts

Herman Stanga described…

“Herman was one of those singular individuals for whom there is no adequate categorical description. He deliberately created addiction among his own people by giving what he called “entrepreneurial start-up flake” to teenage dealers. He encouraged his rock queens to eat fried food so their extra weight would signal to their customers that they were AIDS-free. He pimped off his white girls to black johns and his black girls to white johns. “Harry Truman integrated the united states army. I’m taking multiculturalism and equal opportunity to a much higher level,” he liked to say.”



A few excerpts that describe Clete Purcel….

“Clete was the libidinous trickster of folklore, the elephantine buffoon, the bane of the Mob and all misogynists and child molessters, the brain-scror he’d jar head who talked with a dead mamasan on his fire escape, the nemesis of authority figures and anyone who sought power over others, a one-man demolition derby who had driven an earth-grader through the walls of a mobsters palatial home on Lake Pontchartrain and systematically ground the entire building into rubble. Or at least that was the persona he created for the world to see. But in reality Clete Purcel was a tragedy. His enemys were many: gangsters, vindictive cops, and insurance companies who wanted him off the board. Klansmen and neo-Nazis had tried to kill him. A stripper he had befriended dosed him with the clap. He had been shanked, shot, garrotted, and tortured. A United States congressmen tried to have him sent to Angola. But all of the aforementioned were amateurs when it came to hurting Clete Purcel. Clete’s most dangerous adversary lived in his own breast.”



“Clete dealt with problematic situations among his clientele in the way a field surgeon would treat a gangrenous wound, or perhaps in the way a nurse in a third-world typhus ward would treat her patients. He clicked off a switch in his head and did not think about what his eyes saw and what his thoughts told him and what his hands were required by necessity to do.”




This is a thought provoking little excerpt…..

“As I sat on the steps(David) with Snuggs and Tripod, I wondered if those soldiers of long ago were still out there, beckoning to us, daring us to witness their morality, daring us to acknowledge that it would soon be ours.

I have had visions of them that I do not try to explain to other. Sometimes I thought I heard cries and shouts and the sounds of musket fire in the mist, because the Union soldiers who marched through Acadiana were turned loose upon the civilian populace as a lesson in terror. The rape of Negro women became commonplace. Northerners have never understood the nature of the crimes that were committed in their names, no more than neocolonials can understand the enmity their government creates in theirs. Their pastoral solemnity of a civil war graveyard doesn’t come close to suggesting the reality of war or the crucible of pain in which a solider lives and dies.

But in spite of the bloody bound on which our town was built, and out of which oak trees and bamboo and banks of flowers along the bayou grew, it remained for me a magical place in the predawn hours, touched only cosmetically by the Industrial Age, the drawbridge clanking erect in the fog, it’s great cogged wheels bleeding rust, a two-story quarter boat that resembled a nineteenth-century paddle wheeler being pushed down to the Gulf, the fog billowing whitely around it, the air sprinkled with the smell of Confederate Jasmine.”



An example of visceral writing and sheer justice and vengeance…

“I could feel my fingers finding new purchase on the baton’s handle, the leather thong looped loosely on my wrist bones. I could feel a vein of black electricity crawling through my arm into my shoulder, down my right side, and through my back and chest. He made me think of medieval jester mocking his executioner as he knelt before the chopping block. I could feel my whole body becoming a torqued spring that would find release only when I whipped the baton across Perkins’s temple and watched his eyes go senseless and dead. The procedural explanation was already available. I wouldn’t even have to use a throw down. He had committed a crime upon a child. I had tried to search him before hooking him up. He had whirled and gotten his hands on his archer’s bow. The blows I’d delivered were in self-defence and not intended to be fatal. As I had these thoughts, I saw Vidor Perkin’s time on earth coming to an end.”



David describes Creole and mentions bygone times…


“In a more primitive time, some of them had been derogatorily called “redbones.” Most of them were probably part white, part Chitimacha Indian, part Cajun, and part black. As a rule, they referred to themselves as Creoles, a term that, in the early nineteenth century, connoted the descendants of the Spanish and French colonists who settled in New Orleans and created the plantation society that surrounded it. In general, they were handsome people; they often had green or blue eyes and reddish or jet-black hair and skin that looked as though it had been blown with brick dust.”



And finally a great excerpt..

“I saw my father, Big Al, in his tin hard hat and my mother, Alafair Mae Guillory, in the pillbox hat she was so proud of, both of them on the bow, smiling, coming toward me. I saw men from my platoon, their rent fatigues laundered, their wounds glowing with a white radiance, and I saw boys in sun-bleached butternut and tattered gray, and I saw Golden Gloves boxers from state finals of 1956 and black musicians from Sharkey Bonano’s Dream Room on Bourbon. I saw grifters and martyred Maryknollers and strippers and saints and street people of very kind, and until that moment, I never realised how loving and beautiful human beings could be.”

First Robicheaux novel I've read in quite a while. This one made me realize how much I've missed Dave, Molly, and even Clete, as well as appreciate the inclusion of a more mature Alafair, reflecting real life and working on her own novel. Readers get introduced to a few more of the Robicheaux's quirky, "retro" plantation neighbors. After 18 books in the series it's becoming difficult to believe there are that many evil people in one place; sort of the "Cabot Cove, ME, syndrome;" kept waiting for

First Robicheaux novel I've read in quite a while. This one made me realize how much I've missed Dave, Molly, and even Clete, as well as appreciate the inclusion of a more mature Alafair, reflecting real life and working on her own novel. Readers get introduced to a few more of the Robicheaux's quirky, "retro" plantation neighbors. After 18 books in the series it's becoming difficult to believe there are that many evil people in one place; sort of the "Cabot Cove, ME, syndrome;" kept waiting for Cabot Cove to run out of citizens!

In usual style Burke has Dave begin the investigation of one murder, then quickly adds a few more, turning the plot into a much more complicated crime. And as another reviewer here pointed out, we don't clearly learn why the girls were killed in the first place. Detective Dave & PI Clete plough through and successfully solve the case, but at a cost.

Burke continues his great descriptions of the Bayou and Louisiana, providing not only atmosphere for the story, but also the flavor of the "country." His descriptive language is poetic and evocative. It slows the story for those who don't appreciate the descriptive and only want the action. But Bayou Teche and New Iberia are as much characters in this story as the fictional people who live there. This is the most serious contemplation of his mortality that I can remember Dave having to confront. I also realized I'll miss him when he's gone.