It’s a Mystery: “Life’s not a rehearsal”

A Private Cathedral
By James Lee Burke
Simon & Schuster, 2020

Safecracker
By Ryan Wick
Thomas Dunne, 2020

James Lee Burke’s wraps up his splendid Louisiana trilogy that started with Robicheaux (2018), and continued with The New Iberia Blues (2019), with A Private Cathedral. All three feature Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux who begins Cathedral waxing philosophically about those moments when:

…you get lost inside the immensity of creation…when you hang between life and death and ache to hold on to the earth and eternity at the same time.... After you’re through with the long night of the soul, or after it’s through with you, you’re never the same…you’re on your own, the only occupant in a cathedral in which you can hear your heartbeat echoing off the walls.

He and his long-time private eye buddy Clete Purcel (the Bobbsey twins from Homicide)  have a bond like no other—Clete’s affectionate name for Robicheaux is “Streak” and he, in turn, says of Clete: 

He was perhaps the most complex man I ever knew…The pain of his childhood, the memory of an accidental killing in Vietnam, the loss of his career as a detective, were the invisible crown of thorns that sat always on his forehead.

The two plunge headlong into a maelstrom between two dominant crime families: the Shondells and the Balangies. They are trying to save Johnny, the Shondell scion, and his lover Isolde Balangie from the clutches of Johnny’s father Mark. He is a flesh-and-blood incarnation of evil, as bad as they come. But, alas, to all and sundry, he appears cleverly disguised as a fine Southern gentleman. To Robicheaux and Purcel’s horror, seventeen-year old Isolde is being “delivered” to Mark as his sex slave—allegedly to keep the peace between the two clans. Mark is also connected to a time-traveling entity from the sixteenth century, Gideon Richetti. A self-proclaimed “revelator” (a deity who makes a divine revelation) and one who is capable of mind-boggling carnage. Richettti has plied his trade since the Spanish inquisition and has racked up centuries of horrific killings. The supernatural has never been far from Robicheaux/Burke’s  world and here it’s front and center.

Johnny and Isolde decide to go on the run. Robicheaux’s efforts on behalf of the couple lead to his developing a complicated and compromising relationship with Isolde’s mother, Penelope. She claims that she and Adonis, Isolde’s father, are not really married. Truth be told, she’s trouble with a capital T and the vulnerable, twice-widowed Robicheaux is led on the downward path to wisdom. As he so eloquently puts it:

Everyone has a private cathedral that he earns, a special place to which he returns when the world is too much late and soon, and loss and despair come with the rising of the sun.

A Private Cathedral is a magical journey, albeit a dark and treacherous one. The denouement comes at you like a bolt of unexpected lightning. The dialogue, as always with Burke, is terrific.

James Lee Burke writes like a dream.

Michael Maven, the centerpiece of Ryan Wick’s Safecracker, is a professional thief with a code of honor. He only steals from people who have too much money and he leaves the premises he burgles in pristine shape. He has nothing but contempt for thieves who trash the targeted digs. He thinks it’s not only incredibly rude but gives them all a bad name. Oh, and he’s a fanatic when it comes to planning a heist. As far as he’s concerned, the really good thief’s most important characteristic is an obsessive emphasis on details. He owns a small movie house in New York’s East Village which serves as an on-the-books business in which to launder his real job’s money. His boss, Elizabeth “Liz” Rose, has a posh British accent, looks like an elegant grandmother, and when it comes to pinpointing a piece worth stealing she’s peerless. 

As the book opens, Maven is scanning through a folder she’s brought him, stopping at a large, high-resolution picture:

“A 1343 Edward III florin?”  I asked, smiling ear to ear.

“Should be cake, too…. One of only four in existence. The first two are in the British Museum….the third was sold at auction in 2006. Last year another one was discovered in Wales by a rare coin collector…He recently passed away, and his estate auctioned the coin off last week, The buyer was an American Hedge fund manager named Raymond Hemsworth. He lives here in New York.

“So where’s the coin now?”

“His apartment on Eighty-Ninth Street. It was delivered there.… You know,” she said, waving her cane at me. “You haven’t asked me how much the coin is worth!”

“I already know how much it’s worth,” I replied…. It’s the fifth-rarest coin in the world. So my guess is you could get $400,000, maybe $500,000 on the street.

She smiled and pulled the door open. “Good luck, Michael. Don’t cock it up.”

And with that lovely parting comment, she was gone.

After a week of intensive preparation, Maven is ready to pull off “the Hemsworth job.” He is in Raymond’s apartment (“piece of cake”),  and  he’s got the safe open when things go belly up, as they say. Raymond comes home with a beautiful woman. Before Maven’s, peeping eyes she kills Raymond, and cuts off his thumb in order to conquer the safe’s biometric scanner. As she’s stealing the coin, Maven goes into a murderous rage and attacks her. But the martial arts expert is no match for this willowy, jujitsu-trained killer who fends off his attack as neatly as she finished off Raymond. He escapes, but, of course, it’s far from over . Believe it or not, she’s out for more. While Liz concentrates on hunting for anyone trying to move any type of rare currency, the lady manages to cut Maven’s throat while he’s sitting alone at his favorite bar.

He wakes up in the hospital, forbidden from moving his head from side to side for at least a few days. His most interesting visitor among all the cops and medical staff is a very attractive young lady from the FBI. She is Special Agent Rebecca Browning. From her he learns that his would-be assassin is Katerina Georgiu. The FBI has been after her for five years. As he’s flipping through a plethora of unbelievably varied pictures of her, Browning says

She’s a contract killer who works for a crime boss in Chicago. Responsible for at least twenty-seven murders, we believe. From the Ukraine originally but has lived here in the States for a number of years.

True to form, Maven can’t let well enough alone. He uses Elizabeth’s network of criminals to track down Katerina. He winds up caught in the middle of a savage gang war with Katerina’s vicious, sadistic employer blackmailing him into stealing a ledger from the head of a rival drug cartel in Miami.

If Maven fails that “assignment,” his friends and family will die. If he succeeds, they still might. Which means he not only has to manage to pull off an impossible heist, but he also has to outwit two crime bosses as well as his reluctant new partner, the Ukranian femme fatale.

Safecracker is heady stuff. Wick’s debut thriller has witty, gritty dialogue, colorful characters, and a page-turning pace right to the end. It’s seductively cinematic. It’s a tough, taut, unforgettable take on the complicated life of a master thief.

—Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.