D.I.Y.

It stands for Do It Yourself, and sometimes you can. Sometimes you can’t, though, and when you can’t, when the project or solution is beyond your skills and over your head, you call someone who knows how to fix things. As any homeowner knows, a good handyperson is worth their weight in gold. As in the new novel, “The Hadacol Boogie” by James Lee Burke, he’s a real lifesaver.

The girl in the plastic bag was beautiful once.

She’d had luminous eyes, colorful tattoos, and youth that even death couldn’t erase. And that’s how Detective Dave Robicheaux found her — dead, left in the cattails on the edge of his property like garbage, deposited there by a man with sticks in his hair, according to some kids who saw him.

Robicheaux’s buddy, P.I. Clete Purcell said that finding the tattooed girl was some sort of sign. Of what, he didn’t say.

Seemed like there was always trouble in New Iberia, Louisiana. Always people up to no good, mobsters, and random troublemakers just passing through. Robicheaux was grateful for folks who kept him sane when his world was not. Grateful for Clete, and for his boss, Sheriff Helen Soileau, and for his adopted daughter, Alafair, who’d come home to work on her version of the Great American Novel.

It shook him when he learned that Alafair had known the tattooed girl. So did Valerie Benoit, a Black cop new to the department. Robicheaux was likewise bothered by a clean-cut philosopher who kept showing up, offering to fix roofs and doors and hutches and such.

Did the itinerant handyman kill and drag the dead girl into the reeds? Or was she one of Jerry Carlucci’s prostitutes? Did the girl run afoul of the men from up north who wanted to put a casino near Carlucci’s, or the pimp they’d hired?

And what was in the ground by Carlucci’s Landing that had them all so interested?

Here’s the main thing you’ll want to know about “The Hadacol Boogie”: you’ll like it but hooo, boy, there’s a lot going on inside it.

More so than in many prior Robicheaux novels, author James Lee Burke piles on the characters here and a good number of them are similarly nefarious, which could make it hard to tell them apart. Burke’s Detective Robicheaux is always nice to hang out with but this time, Dave is more introspective than fans are used to seeing and he gets a little wordy.

That’s not a bad thing. It offers more backstory to the character, but it gets long.

And yet, the thrills are solid in this book, the violence more cringey, the culmination tenser, just really everything you want in a suspenseful story.

So bring a notebook, if you must, and take notes. You’re a fan of this series, you won’t be sorry; if you’re new to it, you’ll be glad you did. When stress is at a fracture point and you need an exciting distraction, “The Hadacol Boogie” will fix you up good.

By Terri Shclichenmeyer

“The Hadacol Boogie” by James Lee Burke
c.2026, Atlantic Crime
$30.00
400 pages