Mike Shea on the month’s new releases
James Lee Burke
Pegasus Descending
Simon & Schuster July 11, 2006
The Houston native celebrates his seventieth year on earth by publishing the twenty-sixth novel of his forty-year career. Pegasus Descending is the latest book in the Dave Robicheaux crime fiction series.
What is it about Robicheaux that appeals so deeply to your readers? Well, I think it’s that he’s based on classical antecedents, really the Prometheus figure. He has qualities of the tragic protagonist but possesses virtues that we admire.
Has your approach to writing changed any since your first novel? No, nothing’s changed. There’s only one way to do it. You write from “can see to can’t see,” and you do it seven days a week.
Most of your books are set in Louisiana, where you’ve spent most of your life. Where were you when Katrina hit? I was in Montana. It was Rita that hit New Iberia, where I live. Rita really tore up southwestern Louisiana; the damage is the worst I’ve ever seen. Few people have any idea of the suffering.
Is it true that one of your books was rejected 111 times before it was published? Actually, it was more than that. It was The Lost Get-Back Boogie. Then Louisiana State University Press published it, and it was nominated for a Pulitzer. There’s a lesson there.
And you’re still going strong. Ever tempted to put your feet up and just be done with writing? Oh, no. When I catch the bus, I’m taking my typewriter with me. Simon & Schuster, $26
Will Clarke
The Worthy: A Ghost’s Story
Simon & Schuster 07/2006
(Read an excerpt)
Buy this at BookPeople.com
The Greek system sure must have pissed off WILL CLARKE during his brief stint as a college lad in a toga, because he returns the favor in his second novel, THE WORTHY: A GHOST’S STORY, by mercilessly satirizing frat boys and their obsessions: sex, beer, and beer—in roughly that order. Not unlike a savvy, bastard offspring of Ghost and Animal House, The Worthy finds the confused spirit of recently dead Gamma Chi pledge Conrad Avery Sutton III wandering the Louisiana State University campus trying to protect young pledges and his ex-girlfriend from Ryan Hutchins, the Gamma Chi brother who killed him in a hazing incident (fratricide?). Conrad finds that he can possess and control people, though it is, oddly enough, not as easy as it looks in the movies. Clarke plays the fraternity shenanigans as slapstick—the spoofing is broad, and the characters are more like caricatures—but he introduces consequences that make clear he’s not laughing on the inside. Simon & Schuster, $23
Harry Hunsicker
The Next Time You Die
St. Martin’s Minotaur, July 11, 2006
THE NEXT TIME YOU DIE, HARRY HUNSICKER’s second detective caper featuring hard-luck investigator Lee Henry Oswald, should earn Dallas a colored pushpin on the wisecracking-gumshoe map for its double-trouble combo of mean streets and meaner thugs. Hunsicker is wily and playful, with the audacity to name his series’ protagonist with an ironic nod to JFK’s alleged assassin and the smarts to understand that Oswald jokes have a short shelf life. Much in the mold of Hunsicker’s debut, Still River, private eye Oswald takes on a job that promises easy money for little effort—recovering a personnel file folder stolen from a besotted Baptist preacher—but what seemed a bird’s nest on the ground turns out to be a scorpion’s lair. In the course of unraveling the byzantine plot, Oswald takes a licking or two at the hands of a wack-job killer, but expect him to be healed up and fighting crime on the banks of the Trinity River come this time next year. St. Martin’s, $23.95
Bill Minutaglio
The President’s Counselor: The Rise To Power Of Alberto Gonzales.
Rayo/Harper Collins
(Read an excerpt)
Buy this at BookPeople.com
Those looking for clues to the Bush administration’s seeming assault on civil liberties—from warrantless wiretaps to allegedly condoned torture—will find much to ponder in THE PRESIDENT’S COUNSELOR: THE RISE TO POWER OF ALBERTO GONZALES. Journalist BILL MINUTAGLIO posits that Gonzales’s background as a lawyer at Houston’s Vinson and Elkins trained him to, above all else, find ways to accomplish his client’s objective—a reasonable approach to a real estate transaction but potentially disastrous when your client is president of the United States and the objective is to invade Iraq or stonewall the 9/11 Commission. The former White House counsel comes across as blinded by his allegiance to his political patron and single-minded in justifying the president’s goals. Ultimately, the Bush consigliere seems little more than an erstwhile corporate lawyer with a compelling backstory (he was raised by migrant parents in Humble) who is overmatched on the geopolitical playing field. Rayo/Harper Collins, $24.95
