The Cajuns: A Novel

From Publishers Weekly Told with lighthearted, slightly sardonic flair in a voice dripping Cajun patois as pure as bayou honey, this poignant, thoroughly engaging fable is set in the tiny southwest Louisiana backwater of Richelieu Parish in the mid-1950s, and recounts the foibles and tribulations of a soft-spoken, long-suffering homeboy sheriff. Uncharacteristically perturbed, Sheriff Bobby Boudreaux is torn between duty and his sense of what's right when a local altar boy dies in a troubling accident. Bobby isn't exactly free to act independently: he's married to the obese and bovine only daughter of Sen. Glenn "Papoot" Gaspard, making him brother-in-law to the saintly young parish priest, Father Justin Gaspard. To make matters worse, the sheriff is confronted at Ti Boy's funeral by seductive newspaper editor Ruth Ann Daigle, who raises questions about Ti Boy's supposedly self-inflicted shotgun blast to his head. As the hard-drinking Bobby succumbs to his attraction to Ruth Ann and the once all-powerful senator's future is suddenly threatened, the situation becomes even more conflicted. The moral gumbo thickens when the aged priest who hears Father Justin's confession feels obligated to violate canons of the Church and unburden his awful secret to the bishop. Stir this darkly imagined, Jax Beer–laced bouillabaisse to a zydeco beat and you have a rousing Cajun entertainment. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From