Fair’s Fair “For Book Lovers”

James Lee Burke’s The Tin Roof Blowdown detective novel (the 16th in Burke’s Dave Robicheaux detective series) rises above the “cut of the mill” detective story.

Two main questions prevail. First, who raped the teenage daughter of a successful businessman? Second, who shot the two men who had robbed the neighbor’s house on the night of Hurricane Katrina?

There is pathos throughout as in the hospital where immobile patients have no escape from the hurricane and in the character of an escaped criminal with cancer who is cared for by a wanton woman. The woman, for all her sins, appears quite caring and harmless. The convict, disguised as a priest, eventually climbs on a roof to help those inside escape from the flood waters and in doing so disappears.

The author skillfully weaves images and stories of Katrina’s aftermath into Tin Roof Blowdown and opens the work to political questions about the disaster. He repeatedly alludes to Biblical images, and the novel is highly poetic.

At various points, the focus moves away from group catastrophe to the arduous lives of individual families, especially when the detective returns home most evenings to the wife who does not want to hear about his difficult work and an intelligent daughter who wants to be a novelist.

While Tin Roof Blowdown is timely, it also is sure to endure. It uses a wide-scale disaster as background for the action, and its descriptive and metaphorical use of language further lifts the novel beyond the typical detective story. Despite the unthinkable devastation the work depicts, it ends up being a portrayal of remarkable human courage and redemption.

Tin Roof Blowdown places Burke at the height of his writing power.

Burke, James Lee. The Tin Roof Blowdown: A Dave Robicheaux Novel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007.