A private cathedral / James Lee Burke.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

After finding himself caught up in one of Louisiana's oldest and bloodiest family rivalries, Detective Dave Robicheaux must battle the most terrifying adversary he has ever encountered: a time-traveling superhuman assassin.

The Shondell and Balangie families are longtime enemies in the New Iberia criminal underworld and show each other no mercy. Yet their youngest heirs, Johnny Shondell and Isolde Balangie, rock and roll-musician teenagers with magical voices, have fallen in love and run away after Isolde was given as a sex slave to Johnny's uncle.

As he seeks to uncover why, Detective Dave Robicheaux gets too close to both Isolde's mother and the mistress of her father, a venomous New Orleans mafioso whose jealousy has no bounds. In retribution, he hires a mysterious assassin to go after Robicheaux and his longtime partner, Clete Purcel. This hitman is unlike any the "Bobbsey Twins from Homicide" have ever faced. He has the ability to induce horrifying hallucinations and travels on a menacing ghost ship that materializes without warning. In order to defeat him and rescue Johnny and Isolde, Robicheaux will have to overcome the demons that have tormented him throughout his adult life--alcoholism, specters from combat in Vietnam, and painful memories of women to whom he opened his heart only to see killed.

A Private Cathedral , James Lee Burke's fortieth book, is his most powerful tale, one that will captivate readers--mixing crime, romance, mythology, horror, and science fiction to produce a thrilling story about the all-consuming, all-conquering power of love.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Chapter One Chapter One YOU KNOW HOW it is when you've kicked around the globe too long and scorched your grits too many times with four fingers of Jack in a mug and a beer back, or with any other kind of flak juice that was handy. And if that wasn't enough, maybe doubling down in the morning with a half-dozen tall glasses of crushed ice and cherries and sliced oranges and vodka to drive the snakes and the spiders back into the basement. Wow, what a gas. Who thought we'd ever die? But why get into all that jazz? I'll tell you why. I'm talking about those moments when you strip your gears, whether you're chemically loaded or not, and get lost inside the immensity of creation and see too deeply into our ephemerality and our penchant for greed and war and willingness to destroy the Big Blue Marble, and for a brief moment you scare yourself so badly you wonder why you didn't park your porridge on the ceiling a long time ago. That kind of moment came to me once when I was standing on a Texas dock in the sunset while the waves rolled below me and thudded as hard as lead against the pilings, an incandescent spray blowing as cool as refrigeration on my clothes and skin, a green-gold light as bright as an acetylene torch in the clouds, the amusement pier ringing with calliope music and the popping of shooting galleries. It was one of the moments when you hang between life and death and ache to hold on to the earth and eternity at the same time, regretting all those days and nights you pitched over the gunwales while you deconstructed your life. I'm talking about the acknowledgment of mortality, and not the kind that slips up on you in a hospice or on a battlefield filled with the cawing of carrion birds or by way of a drunk driver bouncing over a curb into a playground. I'm talking about seeing the Seventh Seal at work and a string of medieval serfs and liege lords and virginal maidens wending their way across a hilltop to a valley dark as oil, their silhouettes blowing like pieces of carbon in the wind. The people who have these moments of metaphysical clarity are what I call members of the Three Percent Club, because in my opinion that's approximately the percentage of people who fry a couple of their lobes and are able to talk about it later. You can pay your dues in lots of ways: on a night trail sprinkled with Chinese toe-poppers and booby-trapped 105 duds; or stacking time on the hard road; or kneeling on a hard floor in a convent with a rosary twisted around your knuckles; or listening to voices in your head that are as loud as megaphones. The surroundings don't matter. You're in a black box for the duration, Jason. You literally sweat blood, bud. To say it's a motherfucker doesn't come close. After you're through with the long night of the soul, or after it's through with you, you're never the same. Earthly fears disappear like a great weight removed from a scale. You have no inclination to argue or hold grudges; reticence becomes a way of life; it's hard to stay awake during an average conversation. The downside is you're on your own, the only occupant in a cathedral in which you can hear your heartbeat echoing off the walls. What does all this have to do with Johnny Shondell? I'll tell you. He was out of another era, even though he was more symbolic of it than part of it, an era we always want to resurrect, whether we admit it or not. Jesus talked about people who are made different in the womb. I'll take that a step further. Maybe some people were never in the womb. They arrive inside a golden bubble and somehow become the icon for the rest of us. At least that's how I thought of Johnny and Isolde. Call it a scam or a sham or the stupidity of the herd, who cares? The only reality you have is the one you believe in. I say eighty-six the rest of it. Back in that other era, America was still America, for good or bad. Men such as Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower were president; we didn't have the daily arrival of the clown car. People can say that's just nostalgia talking. They're wrong. For us in Louisiana it was a time of music and drive-in movies and starry skies and two-lane roads that meandered for miles through meadows and oak trees hung with Spanish moss. If you don't believe me, ask my friend Clete Purcel. He'll tell you all about it. I can almost hear him now: "It was deeply copacetic, noble mon. You can take that to the shack, Jack. I wouldn't give you the slide, Clyde." BUT LET'S GO back to that summer evening on the dock many years ago. I had an appointment the next day at Huntsville Pen, one I didn't want to think about, so I walked onto the amusement pier and saw Johnny Shondell up on the bandstand, belting it out to a crowd of teenage girls whose faces glowed not only with adoration but with a vulnerability that made you ache to hold and protect them. Johnny's parents had been killed in an airplane accident when he was very young, and he had been raised by his uncle Mark. I had watched him grow up around New Iberia the way you watch kids grow up in a small town: You see them at a church service, playing a pinball machine in a café, smacking a baseball, quarterbacking at the state finals, rocking at the senior hop, boxing in the Golden Gloves, or boosting cars or getting involved in cruel and hateful behavior such as nigger-knocking and the abuse of the poorest of the poor. Johnny didn't fit in a category. His musical talent was one step short of cosmic, and the first time you heard him play and sing, you knew he'd hooked on to the tail of a comet and would defy both mortality and improbability. Yeah, that's right, in his journey across the heavens he'd sprinkle the rest of us with stardust, even if he was a member of the Shondell family, millionaire liars and bums that they were. You bet, the Shondells had money, tons of it, but like most wealthy people in our Caribbean culture, they made it off the backs of others and had family secrets that involved miscegenation and exploitation of the out-of-wedlock children they sired. Don't be shocked. In Louisiana we don't have Confederates in the attic. We have them everywhere, including the basement and the outbuildings, the cistern and sometimes couched in the forks of our emblematic live oaks. Johnny wore white slacks and a maroon silk shirt that puffed with wind. His physique was as lithe as a whip, his black hair combed in ducktails, thick and glistening; the stars were white and cold overhead, as though the backdrop had been created for that particular moment, one that was Homeric, as foolish as that sounds. Hey, even the waves had turned wine-dark under the moon, as though I were watching either the beginning or the end of an era. "I know you," a voice said behind me. I turned around. The girl who had spoken couldn't have been over seventeen. Her hair was whitish-blond, her skin the color of chalk, her cheeks pink like a doll's. A tattoo of roses and orchids dripped off her left shoulder (this was at a time when nice girls in New Iberia were not allowed to leave home with bare arms). "You don't remember me?" "I'm sorry, I don't have my glasses," I lied. "I'm Isolde Balangie. You know my family." Oh, yes, I thought. "You're a police officer," she said. "You used to come in my father's restaurant in the French Quarter. But you're from New Iberia. That's where my family is from, too. After Italy, I mean." "I used to be a police officer." "You're not one anymore?" "Sometimes I am." She had hazel eyes that went away from you in a sleepy fashion, then came back as though she were waking from a dream. "What does 'sometimes' mean?" "I was fired from NOPD. Getting fired is my modus operandi." "Fired for what?" "I was a drunk." "You're not now, are you?" "A drunk is a drunk." I tried to smile. Her gaze remained fixed on Johnny Shondell, her lips parting, and I knew she was no longer listening to me. I also knew my problems weren't worth talking about and were part of the chemically induced narcissism that every boozer carries with him like a sacred flame. "It was nice seeing you, Miss Isolde," I said. "You believe in kismet?" "Where'd you hear of kismet?" "At the movies. Do you believe in it?" "I think it's Arabic for 'God's will.' I'm no expert about things like that." "My family has hated the Shondells for four hundred years." "That's a little unusual." Her face sharpened. "They burned my ancestor." "Pardon?" "At the stake. In chains. They put nails through his mouth so he couldn't talk. Then they made him suffer as much as they could." I stared at her. "You don't believe me?" she said. "Sure." "That's why I think the Shondells should be killed." "Killed?" "Or blown up or something." "So why are you here watching Johnny?" "He's delivering me to his uncle Mark." I didn't want to hear any more. The Balangie family was trouble, their ways arcane and, some said, incestuous. "Take care of yourself, kid." "That's all you have to say?" "Yeah," I replied. "Then fuck you." There is no human being who can become angrier than an injured teenage girl. I winked at her and walked away. That night I slept with the windows open in a salt-eaten, wood-framed 1940s motel room. I heard the waves pounding on the beach, devouring the sand, as though the tide were sliding backward in mockery of itself. Excerpted from A Private Cathedral: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

A centuries-long feud between two warring criminal families might be coming to an end in MWA Grand Master Burke's superb 23rd novel featuring New Iberia, La., cop Dave Robicheaux (after 2019's New Iberia Blues), set loosely sometime before 9/11. Those who want to forge a union between the two clans, the Shondells and the Balangies, are pressuring teenage rock 'n' roller Johnny Shondell to deliver Isolde Balangie, his teenage girlfriend and fellow singer, to his powerful, corrupt, and much older uncle, Mark Shondell, for what amounts to an arranged marriage. Johnny and Isolde decide to go on the run instead. Robicheaux's efforts on behalf of the young couple lead to his developing a close relationship with Isolde's mother, which causes a conflict of interest. Meanwhile, the lawman must contend with Gideon Richetti, a time-traveling golem. Gideon, whom Burke presents unabashedly as a supernatural being, appears to have pure malevolence on his mind, but he turns out to be a far more complicated creation. Along the way to the wild and bloody climax, alcoholic Vietnam vet Robicheaux contends with his various personal demons and gets some much needed help from PI pal Clete Purcell. An imaginative blend of crime and other genres, Burke's existential drama is both exquisitely executed and profoundly moving. Agent: Philip Spitzer, Philip G. Spitzer Literary. (May)

Booklist Review

With this all-enveloping mix of horror and crime, Burke concludes a trilogy that also includes The New Iberia Blues (2019) and Robicheaux (2018). All three books find Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux tackling powerful men with evil visions of racist grandeur. The supernatural has never been far from Robicheaux's world, but here it's front and center, mainly in the form of a time-traveling entity from the sixteenth century, Gideon Richetti, a self-proclaimed "revelator" capable of unimaginable carnage but also looking for atonement, like a demon trying to follow the 12-step program. Richetti is connected to Mark Shondell, a more flesh-and-blood incarnation of evil and the man with a plan to make America great again as a bastion of hatred. It starts for Robicheaux with a vision of "wine-dark waves" that seem right out of Homer, and soon he and running mate Clete Purcel are thrashing about in those waves, seemingly going in and out of time as they try to save Shondell's son, Johnny, and his lover, Isolde Balangie, from the clutches of Johnny's father. The supernatural elements may be difficult for those new to the series, but for longtime Burke readers, they feel just right. Meditations on time and the power of the past have always been at the heart of Burke's vision, and here they reach a new level of poetic rhapsody.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Burke's fortieth book and twenty-third Robicheaux novel mark a landmark event in the celebrated career of the 83-year-old crime-fiction master.

Kirkus Book Review

Burke wraps up the trilogy begun in Robicheaux (2018) and continued in The New Iberia Blues (2019) by taking a giant step into the past--actually, a Chinese box of criminal pasts. "In the days before 9/11," Detective Dave Robicheaux is working for the New Iberia Sheriff's Department. As usual, the felonies officially reported to the department represent only a fraction of his Louisiana parish's seething passions. When Isolde Balangie, seeing Dave at an amusement pier where heartthrob singer Johnny Shondell is singing, tells him that Johnny is delivering her to his uncle Mark and that she thinks all the Shondells should be killed because the family burned her ancestor at the stake 400 years ago, Dave makes a noncommittal response and quickly regrets it. Whether or not he plans to keep Isolde as his personal plaything, wealthy Mark Shondell clearly has a finger in any number of unsavory pies, and during a semiofficial visit to his home, Dave ends up beating the tar out of him. His fury doesn't seem to put off his old friend Clete Purcel, a private eye with an even shorter fuse, or Isolde's mother, Penelope, who, whether or not she's really Mark's wife, keeps throwing Dave smoldering looks he returns with interest. The discovery of the dismembered corpses of two minions Shondell's hired to follow Dave is only the first sign of the advent of Gideon Richetti, a time-traveling "revelator" whose deadly tango with Dave and Clete serves as the portal to a troubled past extending far before 9/11. Whether or not you buy the metaphor of reincarnation here, it goes a long way toward explaining the thread that links Dave's 23 grandly repetitive adventures. Not the best installment in this much-honored franchise, but the one that best explains its incantatory power. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.