Rating: 
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.
