The rape and murder of a high school girl opens still another doorway back into the doomy past of Dave Robicheaux's New Iberia Parish. Prints on the scene lead Dave to Tee Bobby Hulin, gifted musician and hardcase. But Dave is convinced almost despite Tee Bobby's denials that he didn't shoot Amanda Boudreau, even when the murder of a prostitute points to him as well. Since the second victim is the daughter of mobbed-up Joe Zeroski, fireworks are guaranteed. And since Tee Bobby's attorney, true-crime writer Perry LaSalle, is the grandson of plantation owner Julian LaSalle-who very likely had time to get Tee Bobby's grandmother pregnant before he killed himself soon after his house burned down with his ailing wife inside-ghosts from Louisiana's past are bound to be haunting every sordid new revelation. Those revelations will implicate Tee Bobby's manager, mulatto ex-boxer Jimmy Lee Styles; smiling Bible salesman Marvin Oates; and New York freelance writer William O'Reilly, shot to death 35 years ago. But none of these soiled creatures is as dangerous as Legion Guidry, the one-time LaSalle plantation overseer who's Burke's latest version of evil incarnate-unless it's Dave himself, who finds that his life-or-death struggle with the devilish Legion has unleashed demons in himself that are antagonizing his wife Bootsie, his daughter Alafair, and his old friend Clete Purcell. Given enough felonies at hand to pin on every lowlife in the parish, the main question here is whether Dave can curb his thirst for summary justice long enough to wait for the other kind to kick in. The volcanic types Dave's saga (Purple Cane Road, 2000, etc.) has made familiar are muffled this time out, and the plotting is even more darkly tangled than usual. Yet Burke succeeds over and over again in writing harshly lacerating scenes nobody's ever written before-not even him. Author tour

To read a Burke novel is to enter a timeless, parallel universe of violent emotions and lush, brooding landscapes, where class and racial distinctions and family histories mold society. This is the stunningly talented Burke's 21st book and his best until the next one. Dave Robicheaux, the psychologically scarred detective for the New Iberia, La., sheriff's department, investigates two brutal murders, one of a nave teenage girl, the other of a feckless drug-addled prostitute. The author provides a dense, richly imagined background for his characters, especially the sinister ones: malevolent Legion Guidry, a nightmarish figure from Robicheaux's boyhood; a power-hungry tavern owner; an arrogant lawyer; a combative female PI; the prostitute's Mafioso father; and Marvin Oates, an enigmatic Bible salesman who floats ominously through the narrative. Robicheaux doesn't believe the obvious suspect Tee Bobby Hulin, a drug-addicted musical genius is the murderer. Aided and disrupted by his obstreperous pal, Clete Purcel, Robicheaux runs into the usual trouble. Legion gives Robicheaux such a ferocious beating that he reverts to drinking and addictive painkillers. Though the search for the murderer moves the story, the novel is really an examination of the savage relationships of the characters and the palpable presence of the past. Burke offers a vivid social history of an inbred, corrupt place. As Clete so aptly tells his friend, "This is Louisiana, Dave. Guatemala North. Quit pretending it's the United States." (June 10) Forecast: Expect another bestseller from two-time Edgar Award winner Burke, who should be attracting more readers of "literary" fiction with his fine writing. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Burke does terrific bad guys, spiritual descendants of Max Cady, as played by Robert Mitchum in the 1962 version of Cape Fear. Dave Robicheaux, Burke's Cajun detective and the hero of 10 previous installments in this much-acclaimed series, has tackled an impressively evil crew of sociopaths over the years, many of whom have been fat cats with well-hidden bent streaks. This time, though, Burke looks to the lower depths to find his villain, and the creature that emerges, as if from some primordial swamp, strikes a new kind of fear in everyone he encounters. The mysterious, seemingly indestructible Legion Guidry, once the overseer on a Louisiana plantation, where he raped numerous field hands, has resurfaced near New Iberia and may be linked to the murder of a teenager and a prostitute. Convinced that the drug-addicted blues singer under arrest for the first killing is innocent, Robicheaux goes after Guidry and winds up taking the most humiliating beating of his life at the hands of a man purported to be 75 years old. The particulars of who killed who are eventually sorted out, but the real drama this time comes in Robicheaux's chilling encounter with evil and his recognition of his own fear. The satanic Guidry--hints of otherworldliness are sprinkled throughout the text--is as compelling a bad guy as any in literature; like Mitchum as Cady, he reminds us in the most visceral of ways that the world can be an utterly alien place. The sights, sounds, and tastes of Cajun country, which provide the familiar ambience in the Robicheaux series, are not absent this time, but they are overwhelmed by the subhuman stench of pure malevolence. An atypical entry in the series, then, but a compelling one. Bill Ott.

More Louisiana fare. Burke brings back Dave Robicheaux, who comes up against various squalid types while defending a sorry loser against an unjust murder charge. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.