‘Pegasus’ intriguing tale in Burke’s crime series

“Pegasus Descending”

by James Lee Burke (Simon & Schuster, 356 pages, $26)

Twenty years ago, Dave Robicheaux watched helplessly, too drunk to do anything about it, as a friend was gunned down in an armored car robbery. Now, sober and back on his own turf, he finds the old case has returned to haunt him.

Mobsters who Robicheaux suspected in the killing have turned up in Louisiana, eager to cash in on the state’s burgeoning casino industry. And the dead friend’s lovely daughter, all grown up now, has followed them, bent on getting justice – or better yet, revenge.

That is the setup for the intriguing plot of “Pegasus Descending,” the 15th novel in James Lee Burke’s series featuring the New Iberia, La., police officer.

Burke’s fans will find all the usual earmarks of a Robicheaux novel. There is his struggle to remain sane and sober, and his inability to escape the evils of the past. There is his, and Burke’s, deeply held belief that some people are born evil.

“The two-page evaluation that came through the department’s fax machine was a study in failure,” Burke writes about one suspect, “not simply society and institutional failure but the kind that reaches all the way back through the evolution of the species.”

There is the villainy and hypocrisy of great wealth and power.

“We’re dinosaurs,” Robicheaux’s big, violent friend Clete says in a rare moment of reflection. “This isn’t the same country we grew up in. The scumbags own it, from top to bottom. Except they have college degrees and wear two-thousand dollar suits.”

There is the usual cast of familiar, well-drawn characters: the noxious medical examiner, Koko Hebert; Robicheaux’s lovely wife, a former nun named Molly Boyle; the feisty, lesbian police chief, Helen Soileau.

And, of course, there is a large cast of new characters, each of them rendered with such a sharp eye for detail that you see them more clearly than you would if you had met them yourself:

“The driver of the Caddy had the biggest neck I had ever seen on a human being. It was as wide as his jowls, his tie and collar pin like formal dress on a pig. He chewed gum and gazed at the palm trees whipping against the sky, as though he were disengaged from the conversation.

“The man who had spoken to the bartender was a talker. He wore polyester sports clothes and white loafers and looked like a consumptive, his hair as white as meringue, his shoulders stooped with bone loss, his face netted with the lines of a chain smoker.”

And, as in every novel by Burke (who splits his time between Louisiana and Montana), the contrast between the writer’s lyrical style and the dark and violent world he describes is simply stunning.

As good as it is, “Pegasus Descending,” doesn’t quite live up to the standard Burke set with his previous book, the brilliant “Crusader’s Cross.” But it is a fine addition to one of the greatest series in American crime fiction.