White Doves at Morning by James Lee Burke
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Burke briefly turns aside from his detective/mystery genre to lend his terrific prose style to a story of the Civil War (with some of his family history, I think, thrown in as well). His large cast of characters include a Southern planter, his mulatto daughter, a Massachusetts abolitionist, an Irish immigrant (Willie Burke) living in New Iberia and fighting as a Southerner, several white trash Southerners (Ku Klux Klan types), and so on. Burke manages the large cast expertly and manages to bring them all to vivid and visceral life. One of the best things about this novel is how well the time after Lee’s surrender is handled. Those post-war days were dangerous, and Burke brings that danger to life while making haunting suggestions about how life could become in the Trump-era and post-Trump-era USA.