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Title: Hard to read -- easy to sum up
Review: Here is the Reader's Digest version of "Last Car to Elysian Fields":Dave Robicheaux -- reformed drunk, broken man, and bourgeois-hating cop -- wanders around Louisiana in a funk, obsessing about a tragic blues artist from a bygone era, doing inexplicable things that sometimes seem to be related to police work, annoying everyone he encounters, getting people killed, and nearly getting himself killed. Finally, after most of the characters in the book kill each other off, it ends and he spends Christmas in the Florida Keys with his grown daughter who comes home from college.Burke's prose is atmospheric and well-done and everyone seems to be enamored of it. Sadly, thats not enough to save this ponderous foot-dragger. No one seemed to notice that it was a dull story that plodded on in spite of almost everything its main character did -- which wasn't much. Sorry, but I can't recommend it.
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