The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke

I don’t wish to be too romantic about my experience in the recovery facility there on St. On one occasion, I saw a hot-air balloon rising from its tether in Audubon Park, a uniformed soldier operating a telegrapher’s key inside the wicker basket, while down below other members of the Confederate Signal Corps shared sandwiches and drank coffee from tin cups, all of them as stately and stiff as figures in a sepia-tinted photograph. His acolytes can see through time and become participants in grand events they had believed accessible only through history books and films. Morpheus also allows us vision through a third eye that we never knew existed. The sleep it provides is like a warm bath, free of concerns about mortality and pain and memories from the past. A morphine dream has neither walls nor a ceiling nor a floor. Those who have had the following experience will not find my descriptions exaggerated or even metaphorical in nature. For me, down in South Louisiana, in the Garden District of New Orleans, the wetlands that lay far beyond my hospital window had turned to winter, one characterized by stricken woods that were drained of water and strung with a web of gray leaves and dead air vines that had wrapped themselves as tightly as cord around the trees.

Excerptį OR THE REST of the world, the season was still fall, marked by cool nights and the gold-green remnants of summer. In the midst of an apocalyptical nightmare, Robicheaux must find two serial rapists, a morphine-addicted priest, and a vigilante who may be more dangerous than the criminals looting the city. Bodies float in the streets and lie impaled on the branches of flooded trees. There is no law, no order, no sanctuary for the infirm, the helpless, and the innocent. The power grid of the city has been destroyed New Orleans reduced to the level of a medieval society. As The Tin Roof Blowdown begins, Hurricane Katrina has left the commercial district and residential neighborhoods awash with looters and predators of every stripe. This is the gruesome reality Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Detective Dave Robicheaux discovers as he is deployed to New Orleans.

In the waning days of summer 2005, a storm with greater impact than the bomb that struck Hiroshima peels the face off southern Louisiana.

Dave Robicheaux returns in an adventure as timely as real life: the fight against crime, and the fight for life in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke