Crusader's Cross - Rilegato

Burke, James Lee

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0752872141 ISBN 13: 9780752872148

Casa editrice: Orion, 2005

Riassunto

In the summer of 1958, Dave Robicheaux and his half-brother Jimmie are just out of high school. Jimmie and Dave get work with an oil company, laying out rubber cables in the bays and mosquito-infested swamps all along the Louisiana-Texas coastline. They spend their off time at Galveston Island, fishing at night on the jetties, the future kept safely at bay, the past drifting off somewhere behind them.

But on the Fourth of July, change approaches in the form of Ida Durbin, a sweet-faced young woman with a lovely voice and a mandolin. Jimmie falls instantly in love with her. But Ida's not free to love - she's a prostitute, in hock to a brutal man called Kale, who won't let her go. Jimmie agrees to meet Ida at the bus depot, ready for the road to Mexico. But Ida never shows. Dave and Jimmie want to believe she skipped town, but they know, deep down, that Ida Durbin never got to leave.

That was many years ago - before Dave Robicheaux began his long odyssey through bars and drunk tanks and skin joints of every stripe. Before the Philippines and Vietnam. Now, an older, well-worn Dave walks into Baptist Hospital to visit a man called Troy Bordelon, who wants to free himself of a dark secret before he dies. A bully and a sadist, he has a lot to confess to - but he chooses to talk about a young girl, a prostitute who he glimpsed briefly as a kid, bloodied and beaten, tied to a chair in his uncle's house. Dave realises he can't let the past go. Ida's killers are still out there. So he begins his journey into the past - back to the summer of 1958 and a girl called Ida Durbin.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

James Lee Burke is the heavyweight champ, a great American novelist whose work, taken individually or as a whole, is unsurpassed. (Michael Connelly)

A gorgeous prose stylist. (Stephen King)

Richly deserves to be described now as one of the finest crime writers America has ever produced. (Daily Mail)

The gentle giant of US crime writers, Burke always ensures that his Louisiana detective Dave Robicheaux grapples with hot topics as much as with his own inner demons. (i newspaper)

There are not many crime writers about whom one might invoke the name of Zola for comparison, but Burke is very much in that territory. His stamping ground is the Gulf coast, and one of the great strengths of his work has always been the atmospheric background of New Orleans and the bayous. His big, baggy novels are always about much more than the mechanics of the detective plot; his real subject, like the French master, is the human condition, seen in every situation of society. (Independent)

The king of Southern noir. (Daily Mirror)

His lyrical prose, his deep understanding of what makes people behave as they do, and his control of plot and pace are masterly. (Sunday Telegraph)

One of the finest American writers. (Guardian)

When it comes to literate, pungently characterised American crime writing, James Lee Burke has few peers. (Daily Express)

'...the pace, the plotting and the scene-setting are, as always, marvellously evocative and sustained.' (Philp Oakes LITERARY REVIEW)

Descrizione del libro:

America's most acclaimed crime writer returns to Louisiana and one of the best-loved detectives in fiction, Dave Robicheaux.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Orion
• Data di pubblicazione: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0752872141
• ISBN 13: 9780752872148
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 336