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“Burke mixes street slang and exquisite, but always precise, descriptive writing…Robicheaux is the perfect vehicle for expressing the brooding and righteous anger which is the only possible response to the failure of the United States Government to organise relief when the levees broke. The Tin Roof Blowdown is proof that current affairs can be worked into fiction. It's account of the destruction wreaked by the floods has an enduring power.”
— Times Literary Supplement
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“The story, about greed and murder and redemption, contains some of Burke's most brilliantly realised characters…a compelling and moving narrative, punctuated by his devastating descriptions of the ravaged city.”
— Sunday Telegraph (London)
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“The Tin Roof Blowdown is the novel James Lee Burke was born to write. His imagination has always tended to the apocalyptical—but Hurricane Katrina outdid his worst inventions…The passages describing the actual flooding are tremendously powerful but Burke also weaves a fully satisfying story into this extreme event.”
— Evening Standard (London)
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“This New Orleans looks like Bosch and reads like Ballard…it's worth emphasising that no 'literary' novelist has performed this task of imaginative witness to disaster yet. And none will do it half so well as Burke…he proves more forcefully than ever that he can dive down these mean—or drowned—streets and strike both a tragic, and epic, note.”
— Independent (London)
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“Probably his finest novel…it's quite an achievement to make the 16th novel in a series a personal best, but its more than that—it stands comparison with the best of Southern fiction.”
— Observer (London)
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“Burke's novel is a powerful mix of near-journalism reportage…undercut with a simmering rage at the corporate theft and government incompetence that made the clear-up such a difficult and devisive task.”
— Irish Times
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“Katrina was no fictional event, and Burke writes about its aftermath as vividly and powerfully as any nonfiction chronicler… the novel’s power comes from the way it explores the tragedy of Katrina in a way that is perfectly in tune with the series, a kind of perfect storm brought together by the confluence of fictional and non-fictional realms.”
— Booklist (starred review)
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“Burke creates dense, rich prose that draws the reader into a web of greed and violence. Each of his characters feels the hands of both grace and of perdition, and the final outcome of their struggle is never quite certain. Burke showcases all that was both right and wrong in our response to this national disaster, proving along the way that nobody captures the spirit of Gulf Coast Louisiana better.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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“Burke's prose, jagged and discordant…has always had a hallucinatory quality, but here his descriptions of drowning, floating corpses and devastated buildings provide a background tableaux of madness and terror that knowingly invokes Bosch's visions of hell.”
— Metro
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“In the US, he's often regarded as the crimewriter's crimewriter. But that was before Hurricane Katrina ripped the soul out of Burke's beloved New Orleans and inspired him to write what has to be his most gripping thriller to date…Burke's descriptions, especially of the aftermath of the hurricane, are more vivid and powerful than any piece of reportage I've yet to come across.”
— Mirror
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“Apart from the operatically scaled evocation of the hurricane, a shattering portrait Burke was born to create, the most striking creation here is Bertrand Melancon, a lost soul who can’t decide whether he’s an avenger or a penitent.”
— Kirkus Reviews