True Crime and Fictional Crime

The Eastern shore of Virginia is a hangnail, a hinky peninsula separated from the rest of the state by the Chesapeake Bay and a few hundred years of cultural isolation.
--Monica Hesse, American Fire: Love, Arson and Life in a Vanishing Land (Liveright, 2017)

I wasn't up to his cynicism.  I looked at the oaks, the moss lifting in the wind, purple dust rising from a cane field, Bayou Tech glinting in the sun like a Byzantine shield.  La Louisiane, the love of my life, the home of Jolie Blon and Evangeline and the Great Whore of Babylon, the place for which I would die, the place for which there was no answer or cure.
--James Lee Burke, Robicheaux, (Simon & Schuster, 2018

Since Truman Capote's In Cold Blood in 1966 true crime books have become more like novels and novels more like true crime.  But for me the best crime stories, true or fictional, are rooted in a particular place and time, with interesting indigenous characters.

There is not much to do in Accomack County on the Eastern Shore of Virginia --  low-paying jobs (in what was once a prosperous agricultural area), volunteer fire departments, alcohol and drugs -- while the "Born Heres" resent the wealthier "Come Heres", with their second homes on the water.  Tonya Bundick and Charlie Smith become lovers and start burning down empty houses, to prove their love and somehow overcome Charlie's impotence.  Hesse structures the story like a mystery and details the lives of quiet desperation led by the locals who are arrested and prosecuted by those who managed to get an education; most of the locals could not afford to go to college.  Hesse fortunately goes easy on possible psychological explanations:  "some people light things on fire because they feel they have to."

Robicheaux is Burke's twenty-first book about his eponymous character, a cop in New Iberia, Louisiana, and is even darker than its predecessors, as Dave Robicheaux broods about the death of his wife, worries about his adopted daughter and occasionally beats up some bad guy when he is drunk, after which he goes to an AA meeting.  Robicheaux loves Louisiana but can't stand many of its inhabitants, criminals and scammers of all sorts.  Dave's closest friend is Clete Purcell, a  PI and a man of strong morality and self-destructive habits who he became close with in Vietnam, about which they both still have nightmares. Burke's shimmering style of violence in men and beauty in nature is divided into varying first-person and omniscient narrators, a strange combination that presages fate bearing down on Dave Robicheaux.