James Lee Burke just gets better

Jolie Blon's Bounce - which gives its title to James Lee Burke's latest novel about New Iberian policeman Dave Robicheaux - is an Acadian rhythm and blues number performed by Tee Bobby Hulin, a 25-year-old black hustler and full-time smartass, who happens to be a musician of genius. And also the chief suspect for the rape and murder of 16-year-old Amanda Boudreau, tied to a tree with a sock in her mouth, then blasted with a shotgun.

Two other murders haunt Robicheaux: both of prostitutes, beaten to death by a man wearing leather gloves to protect his fists. "This is Louisiana, Dave," remarks Clete Purcel. "Guatemala North. Quit pretending it's the United States." Clete, Robicheaux's closest friend, looks like an albino ape wearing a very small porkpie hat; his arrival in any situation has, Robicheaux comments, the effect of a junkyard falling downstairs. Once a policeman, then a PI, he's now reduced to hunting bail skips for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine.

His presence in a Robicheaux novel is always reassuring. Not only does it provide an element of farce to counteract Robicheaux's morbid introspection, but it also anchors the narrative firmly in human reality, preventing it from soaring away into a Gothic empyrean.

Clete's influence is especially necessary in Jolie Blon's Bounce, with its dark intrigue of relationships and hostilities between families, stretching back over three generations, with a figure of pure evil, the 74-year-old former plantation overseer Legion Guidry (who takes his first name, and his eventual fate, from that unclean spirit of the New Testament whose name was Legion), and one of pure good, the homeless vagrant who claims to be the Marine Corps medic who saved Robicheaux's life in Vietnam, but whose fingerprints are nowhere on file.

With each new novel James Lee Burke reaffirms his status as the best crime writer around: no one else can create, as he does here, such a gallery of extraordinary, brilliantly described characters, can integrate them into a complex, intriguing plot, and can use language with such sharp precision, while at the same time being so sensuously aware of every nuance of sight, smell and taste.