Finished Tu 9/17/19
This is one of my ancient paperbacks and instead of throwing it away, I'll give it to Janny. It's got about one more read in it. According to the flyleaf, I bought the book at West Branch on Sa 2/7/04 for a quarter. I finished it the first time on Sa 2/20/06 after I had scheduled all Fridays off until April.
I love everything by James Lee Burke and last week I got his very first novel and another early James Robicheaux from Amazon. All the books are full of interesting characters, with colorful names, and compelling plots, and this book was no different.
The central plot is the murder of a black 60's civil rights advocate by a North Louisianan red-neck , Aaron Crown.
However, here's the twist:
Aaron Crown really did kill civil rights advocate, Ely Dixon, but it was by mistake. Crown went to the house to kill Jimmy Ray Dixon, but didn't know that he had moved, and he murdered Jimmy Ray's brother in error. He wanted Jimmy Ray dead because he had gotten Aaron's daughter, Sabelle, involved in the prostitution rackets. Ely Dixon was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but because there was so much hatred for civil rights workers at the time, it was just assumed that a white supremacist had done the deed.
There is also a very strange and evil white couple in the novel. Buford and Karyn LaRose are a very wealthy and influential family in the area. Buford is a powerful political figure and will be made governor, and Karyn was an early love of Dave Robicheaux's. Dave is married and in love with Bootsy, and resists Karyn's overtures. It's revealed that Buford isn't really crooked, but it is Karyn who is caught up in the evil of the area.
From the novel's page at Amazon:
"No one was surprised when Aaron Crown was arrested for the decades-old murder of the most famous black civil rights leader in Louisiana. After all, his family were shiftless timber people who brought their ways into the Cajun wetlands--trailing rumors of ties to the Ku Klux Klan. Only Dave Robicheaux, to whom Crown proclaims his innocence, worries that Crown had been made a scapegoat for the collective guilt of a generation.
But when Buford LaRose, scion of an old Southern family and author of a book that sent Crown to prison, is elected governor, strange things start to happen. Dave is offered a job as head of the state police; a documentary filmmaker seeking to prove Crown's innocence is killed; and the governor's wife--a former flame--once again turns her seductive powers on Dave. It's clear that Dave must find out the dark truth about Aaron Crown, a truth that too many people want to remain hidden."
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