Through the front window I could see Clete Purcel parked in his lavender Cadillac convertible, a fedora shadowing his face in the glow of the streetlight. I sat at the far end of the bar, away from the door, with a demitasse of coffee and a saucer and tiny spoon in front of me. It was night and raining hard on the colonnade and tin roof of the building. And Goldie himself was a jewel out of the past, a seventy-year-old flat-chested ex-prizefighter who had fought Cleveland Williams and Eddie Machen. The lighting was bad, the wood floor scrubbed colorless with bleach, the railed bar interspersed with jars of pickles and hard-boiled eggs above and cuspidors down below. A green colonnade extended over the sidewalk, and the rusted screen doors still had painted on them the vague images and lettering of Depression-era coffee and bread advertisements. One of my favorites of years past was Goldie Bierbaum’s place on Magazine in New Orleans. Now I went to meetings and didn’t drink anymore, but I had a way of putting myself inside bars, usually ones that took me back to the Louisiana in which I had grown up. Each time I tilted the shotglass to my lips I saw in my mind’s eye a simian figure feeding a fire inside a primeval cave and I felt no regret that I shared his enterprise. I went at it full-bore, knocking back Beam or Black Jack straight-up in sawdust bars where I didn’t have to make comparisons, with a long-necked Jax or Regal on the side that would take away the aftertaste and fill my mouth with golden needles. I was not one of those valiant, alcoholic souls who tries to drink with a self-imposed discipline and a modicum of dignity, either. Years ago, in both New Orleans and New Iberia, the tannic hint of winter and the amber cast of the shrinking days gave me the raison d’etre I needed to drink in any saloon that would allow me inside its doors. Just as the light went out of the sky the moon would rise like an orange planet above the oaks that covered my rented backyard, then I would go inside and fix supper for myself and eat alone at the kitchen table.īut in my heart the autumnal odor of gas on the wind, the gold and dark green of the trees, and the flame-lit edges of the leaves were less a sign of Indian summer than a prelude to winter rains and the short, gray days of December and January, when smoke would plume from stubble fires in the cane fields and the sun would be only a yellow vapor in the west. In the evenings I sat on the back steps of a rented shotgun house on Bayou Teche and watched the boats passing in the twilight and listened to the Sunset Limited blowing down the line. The first week after Labor Day, after a summer of hot wind and drought that left the cane fields dust blown and spiderwebbed with cracks, rain showers once more danced across the wetlands, the temperature dropped twenty degrees, and the sky turned the hard flawless blue of an inverted ceramic bowl. What he doesn’t realize is that in doing so he is inviting into his life-and into the lives of those around him-an ancestral evil that could destroy them all.Ī masterful exploration of the troubled side of human nature and the darkest corners of the heart, and filled with the kinds of unforgettable characters that are the hallmarks of his novels, Last Car to Elysian Fields is Burke in top form in the kind of lush, atmospheric thriller that is “an outstanding entry in an excellent series” ( Publishers Weekly). When Robicheaux, now a police officer based in the somewhat quieter Louisiana town of New Iberia, learns that an old friend, Father Jimmie Dolan, a Catholic priest always at the center of controversy, has been the victim of a particularly brutal assault, he knows he has to return to New Orleans to investigate, if only unofficially. So to return there means visiting old ghosts, exposing old wounds, opening himself up to new, yet familiar, dangers. New Orleans, and the memories of his life in the Big Easy, will always haunt him. Sheriff Dave Robicheaux returns to New Orleans to investigate the beating of a controversial Catholic priest and murder of three teenage girls in this intense, atmospheric entry in the New York Times bestselling series.įor Dave Robicheaux, there is no easy passage home.
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