James Lee Burke: The Best of Robicheaux: The author's choice

By MICHELE HEWITSON

The crime novelist's equivalent of the director's cut? The three novels have great movie titles: Cadillac Jukebox, Sunset Limited, and In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead.

This one would rip off your arm if you tried to balance it one-handed in the bath. Burke conjures the swampy, steeped-in-blue-moonlight, sinister magic of the bayou without you having to try to recreate it by steaming up the bathroom.

The strangely moralistic Robicheaux (he deals in murder daily and gets insulted when people use bad language) inhabits a place heavy on the senses: potatoes in chicken fat, saucers of salted limes with tequila shots on the side, night-blooming jasmine and the smell of people cut open with cane knives.

Orion

$39.95