17 August 2020
Dave Robicheaux is an amalgamation of swashbuckling detective, political activist, and Catholic theologian. A literary emblem of Raymond Chandler's theory that the crime investigator is modernity's substitute for the medieval knight, the protagonist of most of James Lee Burke's novels is a flawed and complex hero whose struggles against the mafia, serial killers, child predators, and bigots and bullies of fascistic ideologies magnify into stories with implications so large that they feel borderline cosmic.