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A young girl is murdered in New Iberia and local cop Dave Robicheaux finds himself caught up in another messy mystery, with ties deep back into Louisiana’s plantation history. As well as a vivid sense of place, Burke’s novels have that troubled, dark but ultimately positive portrait of the hero’s inner life, which gives them a depth well beyond their genre. This is one of the best.
About the time I was reading this, I was listening to some Robert B Parker audiobooks, and I started to wonder what would happen if the main characters from either author happened to meet. I think the answer is that they wouldn’t have much to say to each other. Parker’s characters are great fun, and well developed. His writing is witty. The lives of the characters are explained in terms of psycho-analytical theory, and everything has a neat, tidy, alomst comic-book feel. In contrast, Burke’s stories are like a huge, overgrown, colourful wild garden. And they seem to have much more of a spiritual aspect to them. This is particularly true of Jolie Blon’s Bounce, where we even encounter direct (although ambigous) experiences of the supernatural.
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A group of Native American Indians plot a series of revenge killings on a number of corrupt establishment figures, including the director of the FBI. It falls to the Minniapolis cops, including Liutenant Lucas Davenport, to try and thwart them.A brilliant thriller. Balanced, slips by at just the right pace. Has an added dimension of a sociological commentary. Issues and people are given some complexity, and you often can’t figure out who are really the bad guys. Sandford is a discovery.
Black Betty is a complex LA thriller with a human side to it. It features Easy Rawlins, a black private investigator living in hard times in LA in the early 1960s. Characters and relationships from Rawlins’ past weave through the book as he battles with the harsh realities of life and loss, and tries to solve an exceptionally complex murder mystery. Although I’m generally a pretty careful, thorough reader, on several occasions I found myself forgetting who a character was, slightly lost in the great mass of names. Having finished the book I’m still not to clear on who committed the crime and why.The book is well written, and shares something of the style of Ross McDonald’s crime fiction, although I found it more engaging.
