Published by Atlantic Crime on February 10, 2026
Supernatural events have been part of the Robicheaux universe for more than thirty years. While I’m not usually a fan of supernatural fiction, I understand the temptation of crime writers to explain evil by suggesting its origin in the depths of hell. I always admire James Lee Burke’s prose and enjoy his storytelling, but his resort to the supernatural in The Hadacol Boogie gives me the sense that I’ve read the novel before.
The novel is set at “the end of the twentieth century.” Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcell are Vietnam veterans who have been shaped by the horrors of that war. Shortly after the novel opens, kids in a boat see a tall ugly man whose hair seems to be made of sticks dragging a garbage bag across Dave’s property. Dave finds the bag and opens it to discover the lifeless body of a young black woman, a guitar string embedded in her throat.
Dave suspects that a handyman left the body on his property but does not attribute the woman’s death to him. The handyman, Boone Hendrix, claims to see dead people walking, but this is nothing new to Dave and Clete. Clete believes he communes with Joan of Arc, so Hendrix is no crazier than Dave’s best friend. Whether Hendrix calls upon supernatural powers to kill bad guys is an open question by the novel’s end.
The dead woman is Clemmie Benoit, who shares a last name with Dave’s new deputy sheriff, Valerie Benoit. For reasons that are never clear or convincing, Valerie is cagey about her relationship with Clemmie. Dave’s daughter Alafair knew Clemmy when they were both members of an amateur acting group, but she also seems reluctant to discuss their friendship. Their acquaintance foreshadows the danger that Alafair will eventually face as Dave tries to track down the killer. Valerie, in the meantime, is searching for Civil War artifacts, a fact that improbably plays into the larger story. None of these plot elements made much sense to me.
The surprisingly convoluted plot involves Jerry Carlucci, the owner of “a ramshackle saloon and brothel and café at the bottom of a levee a short distance from the saltwater that was eating away the Louisiana coast.” Jerry’s plan to develop casinos may be responsible for bringing the mob to the area. Another potential suspect is Elton Foot, who gets into a tussle with Clete that doesn’t end well for Elton. Also involved with Carlucci is Tommy Driscoll, who tells Clete he tried to get Clemmie off drugs after shutting down the trailer that a former owner of his bar had been using as a house of prostitution.
Some plot elements are puzzling and the ending is a bit predictable, but The Hadacol Boogie has other merits. I appreciate the way Burke expresses ideas, even when many others have expressed the same ideas in less elegant ways. For example: “Maybe she had found herself. You know what I mean? Three or four people are running around inside you, then one day you forgive yourself for your frailties and mistakes, and accept the world for the fine place it is and go about your way.”
Burke refuses to join the (mostly) southern movement to rewrite or whitewash southern history. Dave suggests that nobody else remembers the fourteen-year-old black kid who was electrocuted twice because the drunken executioner botched the first try. Dave will never forget. He remarks that “the past seemed stamped every place I looked.” He sees the slaves hanging from trees. He sees the cops who drop a gun on an unarmed corpse to justify the killing. Dave has no patience with people who cannot learn from the past, who “seem best at banning or burning what they can’t understand.”
Dave has a love/hate relationship with Louisiana that adds complexity to his character. He has spent most of his life in New Iberia, a community that feels like home. He loves the cuisine and lifestyle, but he is clear-eyed about the state as a whole, including its corruption and “long history with the Mafia”:
You well know that your beloved Louisiana is a haunted place and will never give you rest. Why is that? It’s because the enslaved have no tombstones, most not even coffins.
Clete believes “Louisiana is floating away while the worst people in the country wipe their feet on us.” Dave observes: “Louisiana is a haunted place. Maybe it has to do with our guilt.” That guilt includes Civil War editorials “about the supposed lust of black males and how the ferocity of their emancipation would be imposed on white women,” foreshadowing the Willie Horton ads of modern politics.
Despite its allusion to the supernatural (Robicheaux wonders if he is in an alternate reality when he discovers that Louisiana has turned into Vietnam), an action scene near the novel’s end is tense and powerful, a combination that thriller writers often try to evoke, typically with less success than Burke. A scene with a gunner firing from a Huey struck me as highly improbable, but still less outlandish than action scenes in most modern thrillers. The abundance of supernatural elements in the story’s climax was nevertheless excessive.
Ultimately, The Hadacol Boogie is about pain and how to deal with it. Dave Robicheaux doesn’t want to give anyone advice, but his message resonates: the best way to cope with pain is to be a good person, to do good things, to carry on in the present without dwelling on (or forgetting) the past. That is the consistent theme of Robicheaux novels and it is one of the reasons Burke has been laminated on my list of top three crime novelists of the modern era.
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