Mark Charnock

EMMERDALE ACTOR (MARLON DINGLE) READ CREOLE BELLE BY JAMES LEE BURKE

If you haven’t yet encountered Detective Dave Robicheaux in Burke’s Louisiana-set novels, then you’re in for a treat. We find him recovering from gunshot wounds in hospital when he receives a visit from a young woman, who he later discovers has actually been missing for weeks. No one saw her in his room and she has left him an iPod full of songs that no one else can hear. Did Robicheaux imagine her? It’s from this strange encounter that Burke’s eerie novel takes wing, as Dave embarks upon an other-worldly pilgrimage across the marshlands of the Bayou to find her. Burke’s prose is swooningly beautiful. No writer loves his locale more, nor rages so bitterly at its abandonment by lawmakers and politicians. In Robicheaux, you have an iconic flawed hero, clinging to his moral code like a life raft. In his best friend, Clete Purcell, you have one of the greatest fictional sidekicks – a human wrecking ball, so broken by his past, so savagely noble in his present, that he is positively Shakespearean. A remarkable writer at the top of his game, Burke’s novel is a poetic thrill-ride. Orion, £9.18