Creole Belle, by James Lee Burke (Simon & Schuster; $27.99)

It’s been a long time since I read one of James Lee Burke’s novels starring Iberia Sheriff’s Deputy Dave Robicheaux.  Creole Belle reminded me why I had quit. His setting is beautiful, his characters memorable, and his writing elegant. But his plots, to put it quite bluntly, are a mess.  I have always felt that if he could limit himself to fewer story lines, his books would be so much stronger. This latest is no different: he’s got a contract killer, a long lost daughter, a Nazi war criminal, evil oil company execs, extortionists trying to collect on an old debt, an immoral televangelist, a sadistic artist, a cruel albino (who someone tries to stuff into a tanning bed), a Creole singer who may or may not be just a morphine dream, Vietnam memories, a nanny-cam used for nefarious purposes—the list goes on and on.

No one sees Creole singer Tee Jolie Melton when she visits Dave Robicheaux, in the hospital where he’s recovering from being shot. In fact, no one even believes that she was there at all.  But now she’s missing, along with her younger sister.  Clete Purcel, stalwart sidekick that he is, agrees to help Dave look into her disappearance. Meanwhile—and this is where it all started to get confusing —some mopes visit Clete and tell him he still owes money on a debt he paid off years before. The marker was found in an old safe. Then someone shoots the mopes, and the shooter might be the Clete’s long-lost daughter. The mopes are somehow connected to a sadistic artist, the son (and perhaps grandson) of a Holocaust victim who uses a hateful word to describe Jews.  As the plot meanders down each new twist, it becomes harder and harder to remember what the book is actually about.

Underneath the fictional plot and myriad side plots is a true crime novel: the rape and pillage of the state of Louisiana by oil companies who don’t care about the environment, the people, or the way of life, but who have the support of the people who pay the stiffest price.  “Let’s face it,” Burke writes. “It’s hard to sell the virtues of poverty to people who have nothing to eat. In Louisiana, which has the highest rate of illiteracy in the union . . .few people worry about the downside of casinos, drive-through daiquiri windows, tobacco depots, and environmental degradation washing away the southern rim of the state. . .working class people display bumper stickers that read GLOBAL WARMING IS BULLSHIT.

The characters are familiar and charming as ever, although Dave Robicheaux’s praise of his lawyer/novelist daughter, Alafair, comes on a little strong, particularly for anyone who knows that Alafair Burke, Burke’s real-life daughter, is a lawyer/novelist. As always, Clete is my favorite character.  In this latest book, the lonely Clete falls in lust—twice.  This is an amazing accomplishment for a man who, when one of the women shows up at his house, describes himself by saying, “I’m an awkward guy. I have a way of messing up things. I’ve got a bad track record with relationships . . . I’m over the hill. I break the springs in bathroom scales. My doc says there’s enough cholesterol in my system to clog a storm drain.  .  .I’ve got a sheet longer than most perps’. I capped a federal informant. There are some government guys who’ve got it in for me because I fought on the leftist side in El Salvador.’” (Why do I hear Joe E. Brown saying, “Well, nobody’s perfect!”?!)

When the smoke has cleared and the body count totaled, what’s left is Burke’s tribute to a way of life that no longer exists, one that was leveled by Katrina and poisoned by the BP spill.