Alafair
Burke had already published a dozen novels before I had any inkling
she existed. And when it finally sank in that she did, I put off
reading anything she wrote until a couple of days ago. Took
me awhile to get used to the idea the Alafair I had watched grow up
in her father’s novels wasn’t the same. Even then I no doubt
shall always see the real one, the nonfiction daughter of James Lee
Burke, through
the same Louisiana bayou’s
misty glow as
Burke’s fictional character, Dave Robicheaux, continues to see his
grownup Alafair:
Whenever
I looked at Alafair, I saw the little El Salvadoran girl I pulled
from a submerged plane that went down in the salt by Southwest Pass.
I saw a little girl I called Alf who wore a Donald Duck cap with a
quacking bill and a T-shirt with a smiling whale named Baby Orca and
tennis shoes embossed with the words LEFT and RIGHT on the respective
toes. The image of that little El Salvadoran girl will always hover
before me like a hologram.
That’s
from Burke’s most recent of his twenty elegant Robicheaux crime
novels, published three years ago with
the Alafair character a graduate of Stanford Law School and writing
her second crime novel. And still instructing her father, as she has
from about the midpoint of the series, to stop calling her “Alf”.
I’d be willing to bet (were it not illegal, of course) that Alafair
Burke, a graduate of Stanford Law School, a
former prosecutor and
now a law professor in New York City,
instructs her father as well to stop calling her “Alf”. Knowing
this, and knowing the power of richly imaginative writing and how it
can carry you to a magical landscape from which it is hard to take
leave, maybe it
helps to understand my ambivalence
toward
venturing
from the bayou’s misty glow into another,
perhaps more objective light,
even and especially one
emanating from the same
corpuscular soup (despite the myth being more fun, the real Alafair
is JLB’s natural daughter). There’s the curiosity and the
caution. Ultimately the first prevailed when I decided to read
Alafair Burke’s ninth crime/suspense novel, All
Day and a Night.
Not
her father’s style in any way, but smart and engaging in her own.
All Day and a Night is
the fifth and most recent in a series starring Ellie Hatcher, a
thirty-something (I think—maybe fortyish) New York City homicide
detective. She grew up in Wichita, same as Alafair Burke. The plot
uses a familiar serial-killer trope but with several clever twists.
Hatcher’s boyfriend, an assistant district attorney, arranges for
her and her partner to re-investigate the murders of five prostitutes
for which a man is already serving life without parole (known in prison
parlance as all
day and a night).Why the fresh look? Because the victim of a new murder was mutilated in the same way as the others, a way that was never made
public, suggesting the real killer is still unknown.
At
the same time a ruthless, publicity-hungry defense lawyer lures
brilliant young corporate attorney, Carrie Blank, from her
prestigious firm to help spring the convict. The attraction for
Blank, whose half-sister was one of the victims, is that proving the
wrong man was convicted might help lead police to the real killer.
 |
| Alafair Burke and her father |
Complicated
indeed. And it gets more so, much more so, before eventually it all
comes together. There’s something of the classic police procedural
here as well as edge-of-the-seat suspense. And the writing is deft.
So are the main characters. Here’s a taste, right at the start,
right after Hatcher has won a bet with her partner, J.J. Rogan, that
she’d be the one to finesse a confession out of the woman they were
interrogating in the stabbing death of her cheating husband. This is
the banter shortly afterward in the squad room between Hatcher,
Rogan and another detective:
Rogan
was handing Ellie a crisp new set of twenties from his wallet when
John Shannon emerged from their lieutenant’s office and witnesses
the transaction. “Looks like a nice wad of dough you guys got
there.”
Ellie
could already see where this was heading. The most effort John
Shannon ever put into the squad room was cracking wise. With money
changing hands from Rogan to Ellie, his wee brain was probably
overheating from the collision of potential barbs:
Would it be the attractive female detective earning her money the
old-fashioned way, or yet another comment about Rogan’s family
wealth? Lucky for Ellie, more often than not Shannon had a way of
opening the door for her go-to retort.
“You
mean like those wads of dough you snarf down every morning at Krispy
Kreme?” She tapped out a “bu-dump bump”
on her desktop. “I’m
sorry, man. You just make lame cop-eating-doughnut jokes
so...damn...easy.”
“When
you got it, you flaunt it,” he said, patting his oversized belly.
At least the guy had as good a sense of humor about himself as he
expected in others.
Ah,
dear little Alf, look what you've become.
[for
more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti
Abbott's unforgettable blog]
