Burning Angel - Softcover

James Lee Burke was born in Houston, Texas, in 1936 and grew up on the Texas-Louisiana gulf coast. He attended Southwestern Louisiana Institute and later received a B. A. Degree in English and an M. A. from the University of Missouri in 1958 and 1960 respectively. Over the years he worked as a landman for Sinclair Oil Company, pipeliner, land surveyor, newspaper reporter, college English professor, social worker on Skid Row in Los Angeles, clerk for the Louisiana Employment Service, and instructor in the U. S. Job Corps.

He and his wife Pearl met in graduate school and have been married 48 years, they have four children: Jim Jr., an assistant U.S. Attorney; Andree, a school psychologist; Pamala, a T. V. ad producer; and Alafair, a law professor and novelist who has 4 novels out with Henry Holt publishing.

Burke's work has been awarded an Edgar twice for Best Crime Novel of the Year. He has also been a recipient of a Breadloaf and Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEA grant. Two of his novels, Heaven's Prisoners and Two For Texas, have been made into motion pictures. His short stories have been published in The Atlantic Monthly, New Stories from the South, Best American Short Stories, Antioch Review, Southern Review, and The Kenyon Review. His novel The Lost Get-Back Boogie was rejected 111 times over a period of nine years, and upon publication by Louisiana State University press was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Today he and his wife live in Missoula, Montana, and New Iberia, Louisiana.

Like a Cajun fiddler who won't let go of the last plaintive notes in a slow waltz, James Lee Burke seems able to sustain indefinitely the fever pitch of melancholia that drives his Dave Robicheaux mysteries. Wherever on-again, off-again cop Dave turns in his New Iberia, Louisiana, home, he's surrounded by the past--its slow-moving, wisteria-blooming glories and its slavery-induced horrors--but, more and more, it's the present he can't escape, the ever-encroaching floodwaters of modernity, bringing with them the drug dealers, the land developers, the dirty politicians, and the right-wing crazies, all looking to displace the memory of what was with the nightmare of what is. The battle continues here, as Dave becomes involved in the struggle of the Fontenots, descendants of black sharecroppers, to keep the land they've lived on for more than a century and which a mysterious right-wing group seems to covet. Swirling around the action is the enigmatic figure of Sonny Boy Marsallus, former soldier of fortune turned avenging angel, hunted by both mobsters and right-wingers. To Dave, Sonny is a stand-up guy who "proved to the rest of us that you could live with the full-tilt boogie in your heart." But Sonny is dead, maybe, and Dave is drifting without moorings, wondering if "history might not be waiting to have its way with all of us." It's amazing that Burke manages to keep playing this same gut-wrenching tune without its beginning to sound like fingernails on a blackboard, but every time our ears start to hurt, he finds a new way to bend the same note, and we're hooked again. Bill Ott