They died in hospitals and in nursing homes of dehydration and heat exhaustion, and they died because an attending nurse could not continue to operate a hand ventilator for hours upon hours without rest.” They drowned in retirement homes and in trees and on car tops while they waved frantically at helicopters flying by overhead.

They drowned along the edges of Highway 23 when they tried to drive out of Plaquemines Parish. “They drowned in attics and on the second floors of their houses. His word work was sufficient to lay the canvas before me,and the devastation that was visited upon those who had previously been poor but stable was laid bare: Burke knew it well enough for both of us. The setting was entirely unfamiliar to me I have never spent time in the deep southern part of the USA, unless you count a trip with my family to Disney World, and have never set foot in Louisiana. In fact, the complexity of the character line-up–somewhere between a dozen and fifteen important people to remember, when I was on the verge of falling asleep for the night–gave me pause, but then this is #6 in a series, so it is possible that if I’d begun with #1, some of them would have been old friends by now, with just a few new ones introduced (and some disposed of before the story was over). I appreciated his ability to develop characters, deal respectfully but realistically with the tragedy and travesty that was Hurricane Katrina (followed by Rita) and recognize it as such and keep about a million plot threads going without ever dropping anything. There are about a dozen writers whose novels I will read just because they wrote them. Really? I examined the title again I hadn’t read any novels based on Hurricane Katrina, so why not give it a shot? Flipped it over…read the blurb about the writer. I scooped it up in irritation.then looked at it again.

She is a teenager, so instead of finding our charity box and putting it there, she dropped it on the upstairs banister. I had been tidying up for company, and my daughter had selected this book from the “free” pile at school, then decided she didn’t want it. Sometimes people say they “ran across” a book, and that is close to how I came to read James Lee Burke for the first time.

The tin roof blowdown james lee burke