Jolie Blon's Bounce

Burke, James Lee

4.17

7,722 ratings by Goodreads

ISBN 10: 0743552067 ISBN 13: 9780743552066

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2006

New Iberia, Louisiana, is reeling from a one-two punch of brutal rape-homicides, and drug-addicted blues singer Tee Bobby Hulin has been tagged as the prime suspect. No stranger to bucking popular opinion, police detective Dave Robicheaux senses it's not Hulin behind the atrocities. With his longtime friend, Clete Purcel, Robicheaux treads among land mines of injustice, mob payoffs, and deadly secrets, all the while guessing: whom can he trust and whom should he fear?

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Review:

Like James Lee Burke's other Dave Robichaux novels, Jolie Blon's Bounce has at its core a sense of people as driven by demons; both their own demons--Robichaux's controlled alcoholism and the dark rages that lie behind it--and the demons handed down to them by history. Robichaux knows that gifted young black musician Tee Bobby Hulin was present at the rape and murder of a young white woman--he is also certain that Hulin was neither rapist nor murderer. Equally, though he has no grounds for certainty about it, he has a sense that the killing of the sister of a local mobster has nothing to do with the case and that the interest of an eccentric young bible salesman in the tough woman DA Shanahan and the woman private eye Zerelda is not harmless at all. Robichaux wants to play cases by the book--this gets harder when he is brutalised by a mad old racist and when his friends find themselves in jeopardy.

James Lee Burke has always been intelligent about the edge of things, and here he is taking his hero to the edge of police procedure and the edge of the real--some of this case skirts battles with principalities and powers. This is one of the nerviest and darkest of this extraordinary series and one of the most poetic--an odd word to use of a thriller, yet the right one. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

James Lee Burke is the heavyweight champ, a great American novelist whose work, taken individually or as a whole, is unsurpassed. (Michael Connelly)

A gorgeous prose stylist. (Stephen King)

Richly deserves to be described now as one of the finest crime writers America has ever produced. (Daily Mail)

The gentle giant of US crime writers, Burke always ensures that his Louisiana detective Dave Robicheaux grapples with hot topics as much as with his own inner demons. (i newspaper)

There are not many crime writers about whom one might invoke the name of Zola for comparison, but Burke is very much in that territory. His stamping ground is the Gulf coast, and one of the great strengths of his work has always been the atmospheric background of New Orleans and the bayous. His big, baggy novels are always about much more than the mechanics of the detective plot; his real subject, like the French master, is the human condition, seen in every situation of society. (Independent)

The king of Southern noir. (Daily Mirror)

His lyrical prose, his deep understanding of what makes people behave as they do, and his control of plot and pace are masterly. (Sunday Telegraph)

One of the finest American writers. (Guardian)

When it comes to literate, pungently characterised American crime writing, James Lee Burke has few peers. (Daily Express)

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