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Heaven's Prisoners
Heaven's Prisoners
Heaven's Prisoners
Audiobook (abridged)3 hours

Heaven's Prisoners

Written by James Lee Burke

Narrated by Will Patton

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

()

About this audiobook

James Lee Burke’s second Robicheaux novel takes the detective out of New Orleans and into the bayou as he seeks a quieter life.

Vietnam vet Dave Robicheaux has turned in his detective’s badge, is winning his battle against booze, and has left New Orleans with his wife for the tranquil beauty of Louisiana’s bayous. But a plane crash on the Gulf brings a young girl into his life—and with her comes a netherworld of murder, deception, and homegrown crime. Suddenly Robicheaux is confronting Bubba Rocque, a brutal hood he’s known since childhood; Rocque’s hungry Cajun wife; and a Federal agent with more guts than sense. In a backwater world where a swagger and a gun go further than the law, Robicheaux and those he loves are caught on a tide of violence far bigger than them all...
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 1, 1996
ISBN9780743548212
Author

James Lee Burke

James Lee Burke is a New York Times bestselling author, two-time winner of the Edgar Award, and the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in Fiction. He has authored forty novels and two short story collections. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

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Reviews for Heaven's Prisoners

Rating: 3.9312977206106874 out of 5 stars
4/5

393 ratings19 reviews

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    thanks mikedraper for the spoiler without warning. love these books.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Hard to follow story line and did not expand on characters to build foundations for characters
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A slow paced story of love, family and their history. Short and not too detailed made it a nice journey into the life of Robicheaux. I haven't been able to find #1 in the series so this was my first. Will Patton and his voice accompanies you and his accent takes you to the south in a second!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A twist of fate - relaxing in his boat with his wife when a small plane crashes into the waters - brings both joy and sorrow into Dave Robicheaux's life, testing his resolve, his sobriety and his sense of right and wrong.The stakes are raised in this second novel of the Robicheaux's series and the complex mix of characters, locations and conflict adds up to a very entertaining read. James Lee Burke's flair for the descriptive prose, his handling of violence, his obvious love of the sights and sounds of New Orleans and surrounding areas, and the development of an interesting lead combines to produce a story to be remembered.I am very late on reading the Robicheaux series but I am glad to have many more novels of the calibre of Heaven's Prisoners ahead of me.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Well, since Goodreads ate my first review, this one's going to be shorter.

    Overall, I enjoyed this novel better than the first in the series. Cleaner plot, better characters, and more comfortable overall.

    However, I'll be glad when Burke moves away from exploring territory already explored in the first novel. He's a cop, he's not a cop, he's a cop, he's not a cop. He's dry, he has a horrible life event, and he falls off the wagon.

    Yes, I get the second one is more real life (coming from a family of alcoholics, I'm well aware, believe me), but as a plot device, this one will get old really quick.

    But if I have any real complaint, it's with the piss-poor narration of the audiobook. I can't even be bothered to look up this guy's name, but he's hesitant, has no sense of drama or rhythm, and reads the lines like someone's feeding him one at a time as he's recording. Thank god the writing's good, because the delivery is for shit.

    But, for all of that, I'm anticipating the next one will show more improvement.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I've so enjoyed getting into James Lee Burke's Robicheaux series. His second book in it, 'Heaven's Prisoners', was published in 1988 and is like a time capsule for the tough policing that used to take place in the 'good old days'. Burke's lead character, David Robicheaux, is a throwback of the first order- tough, violent, romantic, principled, and unafraid. Heaven's Prisoners opens with the recently retired-from-the-force Robicheaux and his wife spending the afternoon floating on the bayou in a boat when they witness the crash of a small plane. Robicheaux dives into water in an attempt to save some or all of the passengers, but is only able to extract one, a little child, from the wreckage. While on his search mission, he notes a number of anomalies about the wrecked plane and its passengers, and he and his wife decide to spirit the little girl away in order to protect her from what promises to be a dangerous investigation. He reports the crash and various governmental agencies show up to check into it. From that point on, Robicheaux's post-police career as a bait-shop owner on the bayou changes dramatically. Hard-ball policing, violence, betrayal, and some degree of payback ensue, with Robicheaux making a short return to police work in order to make the progress on the case needed to put his mind and his demons to rest.I'm still kicking myself for waiting so long to 'discover' Burke's series. Robicheaux is a great character, a Viet Nam vet, alcoholic, bad ass ex-cop with a physicality that drives the series (although I'm only 2 books into 20+ so far...). Burke can really write and I admire his effortless descriptiveness. His milieu, New Orleans and the Louisiana bayou, and its inhabitants, mostly Cajun, black and poor whites, are often caricatures in the hands of others. Burke paints masterpieces-in-miniature, though, with his writing and allows readers to vividly picture the settings and the players. He's really among the best that I've come across at writing this beautifully in the midst of some pretty violent and nasty action.Heaven's Prisoners comes to a fairly predictable rough ending. Robicheaux suffers great losses but gets some retribution, as well as more loss, in the end, but he lives to fight for his principles another day. It's a dynamite, hard-boiled crime novel that has me looking forward to the next in his series.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Darker and more emotionally brutal than the first book in the Dave Robicheaux series, The Neon Rain, Heaven’s Prisoners stays involving but ultimately follows the tradition began by Raymond Chandler in The Long Goodbye, leaving the reader wondering “wait—what just happened? Why exactly did the person behind all this do it? And what did agency x have to do with it?” In Chandler’s case, there’s some evidence that not even the author knew the answers. In this, I think the author knows the score, but it was beyond my ability to tease out the connections with confidence. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the ride, although I’m a bit exhausted from reading the first two Robicheaux books in quick succession. (Incidentally, someone new to the series could start here just as easily as with The Neon Rain.)As in the first book, also written in the latter years of the Reagan era, the plot partially hinges on the USA’s shameful exploits in Central America at that time. I enjoyed the character of DEA agent Minos P. Dautrieve, a sharp, wry, and honest investigator whom I found impossible not to visualize as actor Noah Emmerich in his character Stan Beeman on The Americans.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Dave Robicheaux is a haunted man, fighting alcoholism and his memories of Vietnam. He's cursed to see far too clearly the evil in men, and yet somehow also recognize what made them who they are. Despite the damage that's been done to him, particularly by himself, he continues to strive for goodness and love. James Lee Burke's portrayal of the flawed Robicheaux presents him as a hero in the best sense of the word. Burke also has a magical way of describing the Louisiana of both today and yesterday in a way that makes me yearn to go there. I'll continue the rest of the series in order (despite the fact that I've already read so many of them) to both see Dave and Alafair (his daughter) grow and to hear Burke's magical voice.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Dark and Complex

    This is my first James Lee Burke and I gotta say it's different from other crime books I've read-- in a good way. There is much more than just a story line going, Dave is a complicated character torn between his dark past in Vietnam and the retired life with his gorgeous wife. When an airplane crash lands a little girl in his life, criminals interrogate and threaten Dave's family,causing old habits to creep up and eventually consume him. This is a very dark, realistic story dealing with grief, morality, alcoholism and ptsd. A good friend recommended this story and I'm so glad he did.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A plane crashes in the water by Dave Robicheaux's boat. He rescues a six-year-old girl, the only survivor.A mob figure was using people as mules, forcing them to carry drugs and Dave tries to catch him and put him in jail.Dave's wife, Annie, is very supportive but members of the mob kill her by mistake and Dave becomes frenzied to catch the murderer of his wife and the people carrying the drugs into the country.Excellent characterization, a well plotted story and a number of plot twists that the reader will never forget.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    The only thing this book did for me was help me speed read! - No honestly it did and not because I liked it, oh no far from it... it was borderline awful. Large chunks of it going off at a tangent and blubbering on about his either his father or the war and at one point about the route a trolly bus (or some such thing) took. The little girl is given a different name and she never seems to mind or complain but then... she apparently cannot speak a word of English and hardly anyone near her or around her can speak Spanish - its just a very very weak story.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Heaven’s Prisoners. James Lee Burke. 1988. I thought this was the first Dave Robicheaux book since he was married to Annie and this is the books where they save Alafaire and adopt her, but Neon Rain is the first one in the series. Burke’s lyrical descriptions of Cajun Louisiana are just a arresting as they always are. ( I wish I could describe Paris like he describes southern Louisiana!) And the bad people are mean and vicious and Burke muses about the morality of killing them. So it is a Dave Robicheaux novel and I loved every minute of it. Annie and Dave are fishing in the Gulf when they see a plane go down. Dave pulls a small Latino girl from the wreckage and is suddenly answering questions from the FBI and Immigration and fighting vile crime bosses. I’m going to read Neon Rain and then read forward in the series until I catch up.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Heaven’s Prisoners, the second book in the series, is one I consider to be a key book in the set.Dave is long gone from the New Orleans Police Department now (although he can’t seem to stay out of that city), and has returned to New Iberia, his hometown. He is newly married to his second wife and the two are running their own bait and tackle shop there. It is a perfect life for Dave, something he was born to and does well – if his past, and his white knight self-image, will just allow him to get on with it.Dave can’t win, though. One day, while he is fishing on the Louisiana Gulf with Annie, they watch a small, two-engine plane crash into nearby waters. The plane passes so close to the boat before slamming hard into the water that Dave has a clear view of the terrified faces looking out the plane’s windows. Strapping on a pair of near-empty air tanks, Dave hits the water in hopes of rescuing some of the passengers. And, largely thanks to the heroic efforts of a little girl’s mother, Dave manages to get the child out of the plane in time to save her life. No one else survives.Dave saw some things in the sunken plane he should not, for his own good, have seen. After one of the bodies in the plane is left unaccounted for in the official account of the accident, Dave starts asking questions. Some very powerful people want him to shut up – and Dave knows that he should. But Dave, being Dave, can’t do that. He wants the truth, and he is willing to risk everything he has (and loses much of it before this one is over) to find it.Heaven’s Prisoners is an important Dave Robicheaux book because the little girl Dave rescues becomes Alafair Robicheaux, the only child Dave will ever have, and 17 books later she is still one of the most important people in his world – and in the series. It is not easy growing up Dave Robicheaux’s kid, but the little Central American girl who almost died entering the country illegally will thrive and become a fan favorite over the years.. Rated at: 5.0
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Vietnam vet Dave Robicheaux has turned in his detective's badge, is winning his battle against booze, and has left New Orleans with his wife for the tranquil beauty of Louisiana's bayous. But a plane crash on the Gulf brings young girl into his life - and with her comes a netherworld of murder, deception, and homegrown crime. Suddenly Robicheaux is confronting Bubba Rocque, a brutal hood he's known since childhood; Rocque's hungry Cajun wife; and a federal agent with more guts than sense. In a backwater world where a swagger and a gun go further than the law, Robicheaux and those he loves are caught on a tide of violence far bigger than them all.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I've beenj in the anonymous program sober for two decades abd U gave bever geard abtibe tekk nt stirt if wgat akicgik dud ti ne, But here, in this work of "fiction" is my story, where the bourbon changes things inside and the red heart and rage that was there all along can now come out, and come out with gusto. The descriptions of the bayoucountry bring the reader right to it. When I am reading Burke's Robincheaux novles, he brings me there, but his Billy Bob thingiews do not get me to Texas, nor do the Holland thingies take me to Montana. Maybe he should stick to Louisiana, the land that we both love.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Several years ago, my friend Jenn, who worked at Simon & Schuster at the time, gave me an advance copy a new novel by James Lee Burke. It was "Joli Blon's Bounce ( A Dave Robicheaux Mystery)". Robicheaux was like no character I've read before or since. Alcoholic, self-destructive and troublesome for his friends and those who try to love him and even moreso for those who get on his bad side. Plus, the descriptions of life in New Iberia, Louisiana, New Orleans and the bayou are well worth the price of admission. Since then I've read all the subsequent novels in this series, including the gritty "Tin Roof Blowdown", written after the ravishes of hurricane Katrina. Recently I decided to go back to the beginning and read the ones I had missed. I'm glad I did, too. "Heaven's Prisoners", the second novel in Burke's Dave Robicheaux series is no disappointment. The lines between right and wrong blur throughout in this very satisfying read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I am working my way through this series. I read the first book, and gave it 4 stars but now, even though I perused the reviews of book one again, I have absolutely no recollection of that story's events.I suspect in a couple weeks that will hold true for this second book in the series too. It's not bad, it's just not particularly distinctive. Of course, there's some "local color" in the descriptions of New Orleans (and etc) but I sorta skim over that stuff anyway 'cause I don't care what kind of waterways or snakes or trees exist in whichever environs.The characterizations seem believable - the main character is definitely flawed and there is minimal moralizing. There is some "justice" involved but it doesn't feel as satisfying as it could have been. I'll continue with the series, however, to see if Robicheaux gets more interesting as he becomes more "modern" - there are a lot of dated references to "Negroes" which I found very jarring.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is the 2nd in the Robicheaux series and is a real edge of the seat thriller. Love this series.Back Cover Blurb:Dave Robicheaux is trying to put a life of violence and crime behind him, leaving homicide to run a boat-rental business in Louisiana's bayou country. But one day, while fishing in the Gulf with his wife, Annie, he witnesses an event that will change his life forever.A small two-engine plane suddenly crashes into the sea and Robicheaux dives down to the wreckage to find four bodies and one survivor; a little girl miraculously trapped in a pocket of air. When the authorities insist only three bodies were recovered from the plane Robicheaux decides to investigate the mystery of the missing man. But it is a decision that will exact a chilling retribution of terror, torture and sudden death.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Burke's second Robicheaux novel. i am reading them from the beginning of the series after reading Crusader's Cross. He is a bit more self-destructive on one hand then Travis McGee but on the other hand he has his feet more firmly planted on the ground. I also have flash backs to my time in south Louisiana when I read these novels. A good well written book.