The Tin Roof Blowdown

There is no writer better placed than James Lee Burke to take on this territory. THE TIN ROOF BLOW-DOWN features a motley group of characters whose stories weave in and out of each other as the storm turns the Big Easy into a lawless wasteland of apocalyptic proportions.

The nightmarish landscape created by Katrina seems the perfect setting for Burke's almost Biblical visions of good and evil - it is as if he had to wait for this disaster to find the occasion to match his emotionally supercharged prose. You can feel the undercurrents of rage and pain beneath the narrative, making this not only his most personal and deeply felt book for some time, but quite possibly his best novel to date. This is not just a crime novel, it is potentially THE fictional chronicle of a disaster whose human dimensions America is still struggling to process.