Despite a new slate of murders to investigate and a new love to provide hope, Sheriff's Detective Dave Robicheaux provides still more evidence that nothing ever really changes in Louisiana's New Iberia Parish.Dave is feeling his age. Although his adopted daughter, Alafair, complains that he treats her like a child, he has to acknowledge that she's an attorney, a novelist, a screenwriter, and an adult who's presumably capable of managing her relationship with Lou Wexler, the producer of native son Desmond Cormier's latest film, now shooting in New Iberia and environs. Even as he's pointing out that Wexler's much too old for Alafair, Dave's embarrassed to have been smitten with his new partner, Bailey Ribbons, who's basically his daughter's age. All of which ought to take a back seat to the escape of convicted killer Hugo Tillinger from a prison hospital and the death of Lucinda Arceneaux, a minister's daughter who's been shot full of heroin and crucified in Weeks Bay. As usual, however, the case is deeply entangled with Dave's personal life, and the links are only tightened by the murders of ex-courtroom janitor Joe Molinari and Travis Lebeau, a confidential informant working for Dave's friend Cletus Purcel. It would be nice and neat to think that they'd all been killed by Hugo Tillingeror by Chester "Smiley" Wimple, the wide-eyed, psychopathic avenger who's already crossed Dave's path (Robicheaux, 2018). In New Iberia, though, nothing is ever nice or neat, and even Desmond Cormier's dreamy fixation on the closing scene of the classic Western My Darling Clementine, which ought to be a sign of his nostalgic attachment to a noble image of mortality, ends up attracting him to Bailey Ribbons, whom he sees as another Clementine, placing himself along with virtually everyone else in the parish on a collision course with Dave.Many of the character types, plot devices, and oracular sentiments are familiar from Burke's earlier books. But the sentences are brand new, and the powerful emotional charge they carry feels piercingly new as well. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

TROUBLE COMES CALLING ?? the Louisiana bayou parish where James Lee Burke sets his idiosyncratic regional novels. In THE NEW IBERIA BLUES (Simon & Schuster, $27.99), a condemned murderer named Hugo Tillinger has pulled off a daring escape from a Texas prison and is now hiding somewhere in his old neighborhood. Another recent arrival, the Hollywood director Desmond Cormier, has returned to his humble native roots to make a movie, installing himself and his entourage in a swell house with a spectacular view of the bay. From that vantage, Dave Robicheaux, the broody sheriff's deputy who has stamped his forceful personality on this series, lays eyes on yet another visitor - a woman nailed to a large wooden cross that washes up from the bay. The dead woman, the daughter of a local minister, volunteered for the Innocence Project and was working to free Tillinger from prison. But while there seems to have been a real connection between the minister's daughter and the escaped prisoner, Burke must exert himself to fit those Hollywood types into his brutal byzantine plot. (I stopped counting after the 10 th violent death.) But does anyone really read Burke expecting a coherent narrative? We're hanging on for Robicheaux's pensées, like his meditation on the living spirits of the dead: "I don't believe that time is sequential. I believe the world belongs to the dead as well as the unborn." We're keeping an eye out for vivid characters like Bella Delahoussaye, a blues singer with intimate knowledge of Big Mama Thornton's mournful "Ball and Chain." Maybe most of all, we're waiting for those angry outbursts when Robicheaux lets it rip: "I don't think you get it," he tells one of the movie people. "Louisiana is America's answer to Guatemala. Our legal system is a joke. Our legislature is a mental asylum. How'd you like to spend a few days in our parish prison?" Only if there's a new James Lee Burke novel in the cell. "there was esoteric knowledge involved in being a burglar," Thomas Perry advises us in THE BURGLAR (Mysterious Press, $26). It takes considerable expertise to select the right house, break in without waking the dog and recognize what's worth stealing. Elle Stowell has been at this profession since she was 15, but this petite, lithe young pro isn't prepared to find three people - all naked and shot between the eyes - piled in a heap on the king-size bed in the master suite of the house in Bel-Air she's broken into. The protagonists of Perry's ingenious thrillers are usually skilled at devising schemes for getting out of awkward situations. Elle uses her wits to break into tight spots, like the headquarters of the shady security firm hunting her down for involving herself in the triple homicide. Elle performs tricky feats here, but her pieces de resistance are the elaborate strategies she engineers to break into that company's control center. If Perry is the king of obsessive strategists (and I so declare him), Elle is his pinup model. the thing is, Serge A. Storms is nuts; nonetheless, that doesn't stop Tim Dorsey's psycho hero from doing great deeds. While gripped in his never-ending quest to write an oral history of his beloved Florida, Serge manages to violently dispatch profiteers who menace the innocent and unwary. NO SUNSCREEN FOR THE DEAD (Morrow/HarperCollins, $26.99) finds Serge on a mission to rescue retirees from the hucksters who prey on them. "They have absolutely no soul," he rages, after viewing one gullible couple's junk-filled home. "They will sell and sell and sell until you either lose your house or call the cops." With Coleman, his perpetually stoned companion at his side, Serge storms into Boca Shores, a retirement community of nice people who need his help. After snuffing out an abusive caretaker, he's honored with a raucous pool party, a tribute he repays by treating everyone to a rollicking road trip we'd love to sign up for. AUGUST OCTAVIO snow is a big Detroit booster. In LIVES LAID AWAY (Soho Crime, $26.95), Stephen Mack Jones picks up his gung-ho protagonist where the author left him in his first novel, "August Snow" - cleaning up his beat-up neighborhood in Mexicantown. Using the millions awarded from his successful case against the Police Department, this ex-cop has already rescued his childhood home and is now renovating the other houses on his street. Snow thinks his old job is safely behind him - until a girl in a Marie Antoinette costume is tossed off the Ambassador Bridge. The victim is 19-year-old Isadora (Izzy) Rosalita del Torres, an undocumented worker who went missing in a government raid, and her battered body indicates she was being exploited by sex traffickers. Snow swings into action-hero mode and recruits a posse of friends and neighbors for a vigilante mission that dovetails with his crusade against ICE raids. Seeing Detroit through Snow's adoring eyes is sweet. But except for the bad guys, who go out in a blazing gun battle, the characters are too good to be true, from Snow's sainted godmother and a priest who operates an underground railroad to Snow himself, who could use a few flaws to make him human. Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.

*Starred Review* At 82, Burke just keeps getting better, his familiar theme of an idyllic past at war with a demon-drenched present taking on more subtle levels of meaning; his storied lyricism drawing on a new range of powerfully resonant minor chords; his now-iconic characters Cajun police detective Dave Robicheaux and Dave's running buddy and guardian angel, Clete Purcell (""a heart as big as the world"") feeling weighed down by the burden of age yet at the same time emboldened by the knowledge that although ""we would never change the world . . . the world would never change us."" In this twenty-second Robicheaux novel, Dave is again threatened by forces from within and without, but this time, those forces interact to produce a kind of nuclear reaction on the lives of Robicheaux, his loved ones, and the inhabitants of New Iberia, Louisiana. It begins with the first of a series of ritualistic murders a woman crucified and floating on a barge near the estate of a local boy made good, Hollywood director Desmond Cormier. As Dave and new partner Bailey Ribbons investigate, Dave becomes convinced that either Cormier or one of his entourage is deeply involved in the killings, causing strained relations with Dave's daughter, Alafair, now a novelist and screenwriter who is working on a film with Cormier. Further seasoning the stew, Dave finds himself attracted to the much-younger Bailey, filling his mind with ""thoughts and desires that boded well for no one."" And, yet, there are signs of hope here even a glimmer of marriage between past and present that give the novel a new dimension, but not before an all-stops-out finale with the power of cannon fire in the 1812 Overture. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A new Dave Robicheaux novel will always be a major publishing moment, and this one is bigger than most.--Bill Ott Copyright 2018 Booklist

In Edgar winner Burke's masterly 22nd novel featuring Iberia Parish, La., detective Dave Robicheaux (after 2018's Robicheaux), Hollywood director Desmond Cormier, whom Robicheaux knew 25 years earlier as a young man on the streets of New Orleans with big plans of heading to California to make movies, returns to Louisiana to shoot his next film. When the crucified body of a woman is found floating in the bay close to Cormier's waterfront estate, Robicheaux investigates. Meanwhile, his pal Clete Purcel witnesses a man leap from a moving train into the bayou. Could the presence of this man, escaped convict Hugo Tillinger, somehow connect with Robicheaux's case? Several other bodies turn up, all grotesquely staged to represent cards in a tarot deck. Robicheaux is convinced that Cormier's film crew is involved, but he soon finds himself in a shadowy world of rogue cops, mobsters, and a childlike assassin named Smiley. With his lush, visionary prose and timeless literary themes of loss and redemption, Burke is in full command in this outing for his aging but still capable hero. Agent: Philip Spitzer, Philip G. Spitzer Literary. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.