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.

LA private eye Elvis Cole and his enigmatic sidekick Joe Pike help 3 children track down their father, a missing witness under the Federal Witness Protection Program. Pretty good up to about 2/3rds of the way through, but this one really loses it at the end. Implausible, lazy writing. The final 10 chapters felt so contrived, like the author didn’t know what to do with the plot, and just wanted to get it out the door. It was so bad I skipped the last few chapters. Don’t let this book discourage you from reading the much better Voodoo River.

Good solid stuff; not quite as good as ‘Voodoo River’.

Nice. Although unashamedly extremely similar to Robert B Parker’s overall forumulation: a likeable, literate PI with a gentle side, with a much tougher sidekick on the edge of the law. But very readable.

I love James Lee Burke’s novels. And according to the quotes on the jacket, some reviewers consider Purple Cane Road to be his finest work. But surprisingly this didn’t quite grab me the way many of the other Robicheux stories did. It’s still not bad, but at times the structure of the narrative felt a little tired and formulaic, and didn’t reach the heights of Crusader’s Cross, for example.

Engaging read, exciting and holds your attention well. Good plot and characters. But has a nasty edge to it that I just didn’t like.

Exciting; good plot and character writing. But this book has a very nasty edge to it. This novel is just a little bit too dark/sadistic for me. A shame because it’s otherwise very good.

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.

The Place is a hotel/restaurant situated on the edge of Camber Sands on the East Sussex coast. The area has impressively long sandy beaches and sand dunes.

We ate at the restaurant and although the weather was rainy, the food was excellent. There were a couple of vegetarian options and I had the grilled Haloumi cheese with cous-cous. That sounds like fairly standard vegetarian fare, but actually turned out to be a cut above the usual, with a very good minty/youghurt-like taste to the cous-cous. Quite a few of the items on the menu had chilli sauce or some spicy element to them, which was a nice addition to your standard brasserie. The garlic and chillies nibbles were a particular highlight; home-cut chips were also very good.

Price worked out at around £25 – £30 per head including drinks. They sometimes have some good value deals during low season.