Cajun Waltz
A rat-bastard misogynist of a sleazy musician comes into some money when he marries the dumpy daughter of a wealthy businessman. He has a son who rapes a girl, disappears for fifty pages, and then comes back to commit a murder. On the old man’s deathbed, the son puts a pistol in his father’s mouth just for laughs.
There are no heroes or heroines. Everyone’s out for money. In a story that spans 30 years and three generations, there’s virtually no plot in the first 100 pages – all backstory and exposition. Then there’s a murder. Actually, three murders. Wait, make that four. No, one is a suicide that turns out later to be a murder. Then there’s the tragic death in a car accident from one character trying to get away from a shotgun-wielding assailant who just happens to be her husband, so technically, that wasn’t a murder either. So there are three murders and one or two accidents and maybe a suicide. I’m pretty sure of that. It’s confusing.
Confusing because there are 22 characters in the second half alone, some with aliases, others assuming a dead person’s name, so there are 25 names for 22 characters. The writing style is also distracting, with the author mixing tenses. At one point, he switches to a screenplay format with camera movement: “the camera pivots to show a black Cadillac…” The author occasionally speaks to his audience, “Picture him studying… You get the gist…” Who, me, the reader?
I didn’t find anything Cajun or dancing, making the title a puzzler. Even though it’s multi-generational, it’s not recommended as an historical novel.
