Poetic mysteries and bayou murder

James Lee Burke’s 13th novel featuring one of crime fiction’s most famously flawed heroes, the guilt-ridden, alcoholic, hot-headed, self-destructive Louisiana lawman Dave Robicheaux, begins with a story from Dave’s book of painful memories.

In the summer of 1958, with college on the horizon, he and his reckless half-brother, Jimmie, join a doodlebug crew laying rubber cable and seismic jugs in the search for energy reserves along the Louisiana-Texas coastline. On the Fourth of July, the brothers, emboldened by a sense of their own immortality and too much beer, and in spite of a falling barometer and a sky “turned chemical green,” go for a sunset swim off Galveston and wind up trapped on a sandbar by the rising tide, separated from the beach by two huge sharks and a school of Portuguese men-of-war.

They’re saved by a young woman riding a rubber-tire raft. Ida Durbin is a tall, sandy-haired charmer with a Texas accent, a talent for the mandolin and a singing voice like Kitty Wells’. As fate would have it, she’s also a novice prostitute working for ruthless and powerful men. Against Dave’s counsel, the smitten Jimmie courts the girl, eventually persuading her to run away with him. But on the day of their planned departure, Ida disappears.

As the years pass, Jimmie continues to believe he’ll meet her again, and even the pessimistic Dave once held a faint hope. “But I knew better,” he tells us, “and when my booze-induced fantasy faded, I saw Ida in the backseat of a car, speeding down a dirt road at night, toward a destination where no human being ever wishes to go.”

This superbly crafted sequence, which would deserve a place of honor in any anthology of fine short fiction, is like a glittering diamond dropped by the author to lure us back to an exhibit of fancies that we’ve perused before.

Once again, we’re lulled by poetic descriptions of Louisiana sights and sounds and smells, fascinating bits of Deep South lore and legend and a touch of New Age mysticism (in this case, Dave’s belief that the return of the brown pelican to Bayou Teche would be a sign from his late wife that all was right with the world).

The cast includes the Robicheaux repertory players -- cool but colorful hit men as trustworthy as rattlers; corrupt, sadistic New Orleans cops; a revered Southern family harboring dark secrets; a fragile and doomed Southern belle; and series regulars such as Dave’s tolerant boss, Helen Soileau, and his best friend, the ebullient, slightly sociopathic ex-cop Clete Purcel. As usual, the mystery elements -- the search for clues to the fate of Ida Durbin and the hunt for a sadistic serial killer terrorizing this corner of Louisiana -- take second place to Dave’s personal struggles with booze and an equally unquenchable loathing for the arrogant and self-serving aristocrats who have held sway over his beloved bayous for generations.

Burke is clearly aware of the repetitive nature of his novels: He even has Clete grumble about his pal’s “pattern” of seeking trouble by annoying “rich people ... you can’t stand.” But any mystery series that endures is guilty of repetition. And Dave’s wavering from sin to redemption and back again is a theme worthy of replay, especially when treated to the author’s mesmerizing way with words.

This time, Dave’s fall from grace is particularly precipitous, involving too much whisky, a besotted and blacked-out visit to a woman on the night of her murder, the savage beating of an obnoxious television newsman and an affair with a Catholic nun. When presented with a report of his friend’s rash behavior, Clete replies sarcastically, “Seems normal to me.”

Readers should find it refreshingly abnormal, helping to make “Crusader’s Cross” one of the better entries in an exemplary series.

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Dick Lochte is a critic of crime fiction and author of the suspense thriller “Sleeping Dog.”