MWA Grand Master Burke continues to raise the bar for himself, and the reader, as shown by his lyrical, insightful 19th Dave Robicheaux novel (after 2010's The Glass Rainbow). While the New Iberia, La., deputy sheriff is recovering in a New Orleans hospital from a bullet wound, he receives a visit from Cajun singer Tee Jolie Melton, who leaves him an iPod loaded with music, including the blues song "My Creole Belle." Only thing is, Tee Jolie supposedly disappeared months earlier, and her teenage sister, Blue Melton, has just turned up frozen in a block of ice. Meanwhile, Clete Purcel, Robicheaux's hard-drinking best friend, has problems of his own: some local wise guys are trying to blackmail him, and he fears his lost daughter, Gretchen, may be a notorious assassin. As Robicheaux and Purcel suit up again to take on an array of foes, including corrupt politicians, oil men, and a wealthy old man they suspect is a Nazi war criminal, they feel the weight of their own history, and begin to hear the ghostly whisper of mortality. This is another stunner from a modern master. Agent: Philip Spitzer, Philip G. Spitzer Literary Agency. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

In the finale (spoiler alert!) of The Glass Rainbow, Dave Robicheaux, the Cajun police detective featured in Burke's long-running mystery series, was shot in the back and faded out of consciousness, murkily seeing (or hallucinating?) himself being carried aboard an old-time steamboat. In this new volume's opening pages, Robicheaux is recuperating from his injuries. But all is not well in the humid swamps of New Iberia Parish, where there is little that is peaceful and even less that is pure, and sex, death, and corruption pervade the humid atmosphere like the tentacles of foul-smelling oil that contaminates the Gulf. Still groggy from painkillers, Robicheaux sees a troubled young woman in his hospital room, a Creole musician who leaves him with a haunting song and a plea for help. Is she just another hallucination? Longtime friend and fellow investigator Clete Purcel has his own problems, as a deadly contract killer roaming the streets of New Orleans seems to have a mysterious connection to his past. As the bodies of the innocent and the guilty add up, both men are drawn once more into the struggle against "the evil that men do." Verdict Despite the inevitable violence, atmosphere takes precedence over plot, and there is a melancholy and autumnal tone to Robicheaux's thoughts in the 19th book in the series. Series fans will want this. [See Prepub Alert, 1/21/12.]-Bradley A. Scott, Corpus Christi, TX (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Ghosts have always roamed freely through James Lee Burke's haunting mysteries set in the Louisiana bayous and featuring Dave Robicheaux, a sheriff's deputy in Iberia Parish. "I believe their story has never been adequately told and they will never rest until it is," the Cajun detective says in CREOLE BELLE (Simon & Schuster, $27.99), referring to the ghosts of plantation slaves, Confederate soldiers and uprooted Acadians he sees in the watery mists. Robicheaux is in a New Orleans clinic recovering from gunshot wounds when a zydeco singer named Tee Jolie Melton appears to him with a Dr Pepper, an iPod filled with his favorite tunes, and a weird story about defective parts on an oil rig. In the real world, Tee Jolie hasn't been seen in months, but whether she's a morphine vision or an actual spook, she awakens Robicheaux's fury over the blowout of a well that has fouled the Gulf ecosystem, triggering one of his heartbroken laments for the unspoiled paradise of his youth. Burke is the reigning champ of nostalgia noir - violent stories in which big strong men get all weepy about the ruination of their beloved home place and take vengeance on the predatory villains responsible for the devastation. To be sure, the destruction of a pristine natural environment is a thematic staple of the regional crime novel, but nobody can touch Burke in the lyrical expression of howling grief. With his history of "alcoholism, depression, violence and bloodshed," Robicheaux is the properly flawed hero for this tale of epic woe, which expands from oil-drilling disasters and missing singers to take in drug running, human trafficking, art forgery and Nazi war criminals. "I wanted to see the rain wash clean all the surfaces of the earth, as it did in Noah's time," Robicheaux declares. But if the rain won't come, blood will do just as well. For this, he turns to his sidekick, Clete Purcel, a mountain of a man who plays the avenger to Robicheaux's redeemer. The twist is that Clete has just discovered he has a daughter who may be the hired assassin gunning for him and his friends. "Had his seed produced a psychopath?" he wonders. That's an unsettling thought for someone who has Technicolor nightmares about all the bad things he's done, but a good question for a novel that shows how the sins of the fathers poison the ground their children walk on. The small towns where Martin Walker sets his enchanting country mysteries embody the sublime physical beauty and intractable political problems of the Dordogne region of France. Bruno Courrèges, the peaceable chief of police in the fictional village of St. Denis, would ideally spend his days tending his vineyard, coaching the local rugby team and cooking up fabulous feasts for his friends. But in THE CROWDED GRAVE (Knopf, $24.95), he has to contend with PETA militants tearing down the goose pens of local farmers and Basque terrorists provoked by a summit between France and Spain, not to mention the remains of a modern-day murder victim that turn up at an archaeological dig. But Bruno's biggest headache is the repressive new magistrate, a staunch foe of the hunt, a vegetarian and (quelle horreur!) a teetotaler who doesn't appreciate the hedonistic joys of his lovely valley. She'll learn. Could anyone be lonelier than a mother who's been ostracized by all the other mothers at her child's primary school? Louise Millar puts that onus on the heroine of her first novel, THE PLAYDATE (Emily Bestler/Atria, paper, $15), a disturbing psychological thriller that probes the insular lives of social misfits in a London suburb. The three women in this narrative have cause to be unhappy. Callie, whose little girl has a heart defect, can't break through the other parents' hostility toward an unemployed and insolvent single mother. Callie's best (indeed her only) friend, Suzy, the outgoing mom of three boys, has a high-earning mate and no money worries. But her husband neglects her, and being American is reason enough for her to get the cold shoulder. Debs, the pathologically antisocial older woman who has just moved onto their street, has a husband at home, but not in her bed. The balance of their social dynamic abruptly shifts when Callie returns to her old job, unwittingly posing a threat to her neighbors and endangering the life of her child. Christopher Brookmyre opens his new novel, WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED (Atlantic Monthly, $25), with a provocative line: "It didn't seem like Glasgow." And so it doesn't - at least not the Glasgow of his previous mysteries, which exist in some surreal universe where strange people are forever doing peculiar things. The main characters in this smartly written mainstream detective story aren't a bit odd. Detective Superintendent Catherine McLeod is a respected officer whose job with the organized crime unit puts her in the middle of a nasty turf war between two local gangs. She has a quick wit and a tart tongue ("Plenty of people have to live in gangland. Just none of the gangsters"), but a failed actress named Jasmine Sharp is a better prospect for character development. Having dropped her studies after the death of her mother, Jasmine was rescued by her mother's cousin, who took her into his one-man detective firm and was training her in investigative work when he suddenly disappeared. Although Brookmyre deftly twists one case around the other, he hasn't quite figured out how to make his two players work as a team. A Cajun detective is haunted by ghosts of the Louisiana bayou.

*Starred Review* When we last saw Dave Robicheaux, in The Glass Rainbow (2010), he was near death, as was his best friend, Clete Purcell, after a shoot-out on Bayou Teche. As this latest Robicheaux novel begins, Dave is still recovering from his wounds in the hospital. Mortality hangs heavily over both Dave and Clete once again, as the so-called Bobbsey Twins try to rally their flagging forces for another go-around with the forces of evil. It begins when Dave gets a visit in the middle of the night from Tee Jolie Melton, a Cajun singer who claims to have fallen in with a bad man and is worried for her life. But was Tee Jolie really there, or did Dave, still on morphine, imagine the whole thing? The plot thickens when Tee Jolie's sister is murdered, and a mysterious woman, who may have shocking ties to Clete, appears to be killing low-level mobsters in New Orleans. This tale plays out much like The Glass Rainbow intimations of mortality; melancholic musing on the pillaging of once-Edenic South Louisiana; cathartic, guns-blazing climax but, as always, Burke brings something new to the table, this time in his introduction of significant new characters (the mysterious hit woman) and in his deepening treatment of familiar figures (Clete Purcell has grown from a roughneck sidekick to a figure nearly as complex and fascinating as Dave himself). Dave and Clete may still be unbowed, but they are certainly broken and all the more interesting for it: We were out-of-step and out-of-sync with the world and with ourselves, and knowing this we held on to each other like two men in a gale, the fire burning so brightly behind us that the backs of our necks glowed with the heat. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A new Dave Robicheaux novel is always front-page news in the mystery world, and Burke's publisher will respond accordingly.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist