Once an officer for the New Orleans Police Department, Robicheaux constantly breaches the ethical code over the course of just about every case he works on and currently pursues cases in New Iberia, Louisiana as sheriff's deputy. He is a recovering alcoholic whose demons stem from his service as a U.S. Army infantry lieutenant in the Vietnam War and his impoverished difficult childhood in rural Louisiana; his mother abandoned the family (and was later murdered) and his father died in an oil rig explosion. He still experiences periods of savage depression and nightmares, which are only exacerbated by the murder of his wife Annie Ballard, a social worker. He married a mobster's widow Bootsie, a lupus sufferer, and adopted the El Salvadorean orphan Alafair (the namesake of Burke's own daughter), after he saves her from the wreckage of an airplane. After Bootsie's death he weds a strong minded former Maryknoll nun by the name of Molly. His best friend is the violent, alcoholic, ex-police officer, private investigator, and bail-bondsman Cletus Purcel.
"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!"
Shakespeare, King Lear (Edmund) Act I, scene ii
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