A Private Cathedral: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke (English) Paperb

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After finding himself caught up in one of Louisiana's oldest and bloodiest family rivalries, Detective Dave Robicheaux must battle the most terrifying adversary he has ever encountered: a time-traveling superhuman assassin.The Shondell and Balangie families are longtime enemies in the New Iberia criminal underworld and show each other no mercy. Yet their youngest heirs, Johnny Shondell and Isolde Balangie, rock and roll-musician teenagers with magical voices, have fallen in love and run away after Isolde was given as a sex slave to Johnny's uncle. As he seeks to uncover why, Detective Dave Robicheaux gets too close to both Isolde's mother and the mistress of her father, a venomous New Orleans mafioso whose jealousy has no bounds. In retribution, he hires a mysterious assassin to go after Robicheaux and his longtime partner, Clete Purcel. This hitman is unlike any the "Bobbsey Twins from Homicide" have ever faced. He has the ability to induce horrifying hallucinations and travels on a menacing ghost ship that materializes without warning. In order to defeat him and rescue Johnny and Isolde, Robicheaux will have to overcome the demons that have tormented him throughout his adult life--alcoholism, specters from combat in Vietnam, and painful memories of women to whom he opened his heart only to see killed. A Private Cathedral, James Lee Burke's fortieth book, is his most powerful tale, one that will captivate readers--mixing crime, romance, mythology, horror, and science fiction to produce a thrilling story about the all-consuming, all-conquering power of love.

FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Author Biography

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.

Review

"An imaginative blend of crime and other genres, Burke's existential drama is both exquisitely executed and profoundly moving."-Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Burke has concocted his usual gumbo of thrills and chills, stirred it with gusto and seasoned it with plenty of local superstition and rumor. What makes these books so enduring (this is the 23rd Robicheaux novel) and the storytelling so seductive is that Burke has the voice to do justice to the region's ancient curses and its modern crimes."-Marilyn Stasio, for The New York Times Book Review "Super-dark, complex and absolutely epic! Such a wonderful book" -Nick Cave "[A]ll-enveloping mix of horror and crime" -Booklist (starred review) "You can always count on Burke, the prolific best-selling author and two-time winner of the Edgar Award, to deliver a white-hot page-turner."-AARP Magazine "Burke has the poetic gifts to match the otherworldly musings his Louisiana lawman occasionally finds himself dwelling on." -CrimeReads "Like all Burke's novels, this one is lush and lyrical and poignant and pretty damn brutal. It's a journey into Robicheaux's heart of darkness and America's." -Minnesota Star Tribune "Fabulous. Imagine if Stephen King was hired to direct an episode of The Sopranos set in Louisiana. If you haven't read James Lee Burke before, you can jump right in with this one." -Brad Thor

Review Quote

"An imaginative blend of crime and other genres, Burke's existential drama is both exquisitely executed and profoundly moving." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Burke has concocted his usual gumbo of thrills and chills, stirred it with gusto and seasoned it with plenty of local superstition and rumor. What makes these books so enduring (this is the 23rd Robicheaux novel) and the storytelling so seductive is that Burke has the voice to do justice to the region's ancient curses and its modern crimes." --Marilyn Stasio, for The New York Times Book Review "Super-dark, complex and absolutely epic! Such a wonderful book" --Nick Cave "[A]ll-enveloping mix of horror and crime" -- Booklist (starred review) "You can always count on Burke, the prolific best-selling author and two-time winner of the Edgar Award, to deliver a white-hot page-turner." --AARP Magazine "Burke has the poetic gifts to match the otherworldly musings his Louisiana lawman occasionally finds himself dwelling on." -- CrimeReads "Like all Burke's novels, this one is lush and lyrical and poignant and pretty damn brutal. It's a journey into Robicheaux's heart of darkness and America's." -- Minnesota Star Tribune "Fabulous. Imagine if Stephen King was hired to direct an episode of The Sopranos set in Louisiana. If you haven't read James Lee Burke before, you can jump right in with this one." --Brad Thor

Excerpt from Book

Chapter One Chapter One YOU KNOW HOW it is when you''ve kicked around the globe too long and scorched your grits too many times with four fingers of Jack in a mug and a beer back, or with any other kind of flak juice that was handy. And if that wasn''t enough, maybe doubling down in the morning with a half-dozen tall glasses of crushed ice and cherries and sliced oranges and vodka to drive the snakes and the spiders back into the basement. Wow, what a gas. Who thought we''d ever die? But why get into all that jazz? I''ll tell you why. I''m talking about those moments when you strip your gears, whether you''re chemically loaded or not, and get lost inside the immensity of creation and see too deeply into our ephemerality and our penchant for greed and war and willingness to destroy the Big Blue Marble, and for a brief moment you scare yourself so badly you wonder why you didn''t park your porridge on the ceiling a long time ago. That kind of moment came to me once when I was standing on a Texas dock in the sunset while the waves rolled below me and thudded as hard as lead against the pilings, an incandescent spray blowing as cool as refrigeration on my clothes and skin, a green-gold light as bright as an acetylene torch in the clouds, the amusement pier ringing with calliope music and the popping of shooting galleries. It was one of the moments when you hang between life and death and ache to hold on to the earth and eternity at the same time, regretting all those days and nights you pitched over the gunwales while you deconstructed your life. I''m talking about the acknowledgment of mortality, and not the kind that slips up on you in a hospice or on a battlefield filled with the cawing of carrion birds or by way of a drunk driver bouncing over a curb into a playground. I''m talking about seeing the Seventh Seal at work and a string of medieval serfs and liege lords and virginal maidens wending their way across a hilltop to a valley dark as oil, their silhouettes blowing like pieces of carbon in the wind. The people who have these moments of metaphysical clarity are what I call members of the Three Percent Club, because in my opinion that''s approximately the percentage of people who fry a couple of their lobes and are able to talk about it later. You can pay your dues in lots of ways: on a night trail sprinkled with Chinese toe-poppers and booby-trapped 105 duds; or stacking time on the hard road; or kneeling on a hard floor in a convent with a rosary twisted around your knuckles; or listening to voices in your head that are as loud as megaphones. The surroundings don''t matter. You''re in a black box for the duration, Jason. You literally sweat blood, bud. To say it''s a motherfucker doesn''t come close. After you''re through with the long night of the soul, or after it''s through with you, you''re never the same. Earthly fears disappear like a great weight removed from a scale. You have no inclination to argue or hold grudges; reticence becomes a way of life; it''s hard to stay awake during an average conversation. The downside is you''re on your own, the only occupant in a cathedral in which you can hear your heartbeat echoing off the walls. What does all this have to do with Johnny Shondell? I''ll tell you. He was out of another era, even though he was more symbolic of it than part of it, an era we always want to resurrect, whether we admit it or not. Jesus talked about people who are made different in the womb. I''ll take that a step further. Maybe some people were never in the womb. They arrive inside a golden bubble and somehow become the icon for the rest of us. At least that''s how I thought of Johnny and Isolde. Call it a scam or a sham or the stupidity of the herd, who cares? The only reality you have is the one you believe in. I say eighty-six the rest of it. Back in that other era, America was still America, for good or bad. Men such as Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower were president; we didn''t have the daily arrival of the clown car. People can say that''s just nostalgia talking. They''re wrong. For us in Louisiana it was a time of music and drive-in movies and starry skies and two-lane roads that meandered for miles through meadows and oak trees hung with Spanish moss. If you don''t believe me, ask my friend Clete Purcel. He''ll tell you all about it. I can almost hear him now: "It was deeply copacetic, noble mon. You can take that to the shack, Jack. I wouldn''t give you the slide, Clyde." BUT LET''S GO back to that summer evening on the dock many years ago. I had an appointment the next day at Huntsville Pen, one I didn''t want to think about, so I walked onto the amusement pier and saw Johnny Shondell up on the bandstand, belting it out to a crowd of teenage girls whose faces glowed not only with adoration but with a vulnerability that made you ache to hold and protect them. Johnny''s parents had been killed in an airplane accident when he was very young, and he had been raised by his uncle Mark. I had watched him grow up around New Iberia the way you watch kids grow up in a small town: You see them at a church service, playing a pinball machine in a caf

Details ISBN1982151692 Author James Lee Burke Short Title A Private Cathedral Pages 384 Publisher Simon & Schuster Series Dave Robicheaux Language English Year 2021 ISBN-10 1982151692 ISBN-13 9781982151690 Format Paperback Publication Date 2021-06-22 Subtitle A Dave Robicheaux Novel DEWEY 813.54 Imprint Simon & Schuster UK Release Date 2021-06-22 Audience General We've got this

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