Pop quiz: some of the characters in a novel are named Julie Galjour, Grace and Justin Pitre, Minna Cancienne, Buddy Dupere and ‘Ti-Ray Lajaune. Where is the novel set? If you didn’t say Louisiana, you just haven’t been reading widely enough or have a tin ear. Ken Wells does NOT have a tin ear and the characters are as euphonious as their speech: “He got banged as hard as a Mardi Gras drum” is typical. Unfortunately for this reader, so was the situation in “Crawfish Mountain.

While I certainly have sympathy for the environmentalists and not much for the oil companies who are destroying the bayou country of Louisiana without about as much regret as they have demonstrated over destroying other areas of the globe in order to exploit resources at all costs, this story of a semi-corrupt Louisiana governor, Joe T. Evangeline (yeah, Longfellow is grinding his molars), his lovely and smart-as-a-whip colleague Julie Galjour and the pure-as-the-court-boullion Pitres has been told before and the plot moves in a predictable straight line from corruption to comeuppance. One does hanker for some of the shrimp, catfish court boullion (“coo-boo-yan”) and other dishes and getting a hold of one of those ten-pound redfish sounds like a good way to spend an afternoon, but the heroes are too pure, the villains too starkly evil (even though they are also inept) to maintain anything but a slight distance from them all so the stains that won’t wash out can be avoided.

Wells has, as his expressed purpose, a point to make about the dangerous procedures being used to rape the bayous and swamps of a critical area of our natural habitat. What isn’t being drilled for more oil is being exploited as waste dump for dangerous chemicals that kill fish and trees and endanger mankind. He makes that point, but I wished for a bit more meat on the bones of his characters. Almost every woman under 40 is dangerously beautiful and only the good guys are handsome and witty. The deck is stacked and, unlike a good Creole meal, one is left wanting more.