Starred review of ANOTHER KIND OF EDEN from Booklist!
In The Jealous Kind (2016), set in early-1950s Galveston, Aaron Holland Broussard was a teenager in the grips of passion. In this latest chapter in Burke’s multigenerational Holland saga, it’s 10 years later, 1962, on the cusp of the hippie era, and Aaron, now a nightmare-haunted Korean War vet, is working on a ranch near Denver and trying to write. Like all of Burke’s heroes, Aaron can’t keep his mouth shut or his fists at his sides. First, he defends a woman who’s being harassed by her professor, which leads to encounters with some early-wave flower children, one of whom is less peacenik and more predator. Meanwhile, Aaron gets on the wrong side of a bent businessman and his son, both of whom seem driven by something way beyond garden-variety meanness. The supernatural, especially in the form of demons, has become a near-constant presence in Burke’s fiction, and here those demons are ready to rumble. Like Dave Robicheaux, Burke’s other series hero, Aaron has “always believed in the unseen world,” so he’s not completely surprised by the vibes he’s getting from his adversaries, but he has no conception of the otherworldly carnage that awaits him in the book’s finale. Incorporating elements of horror into otherwise realistic thrillers is a thing these days, but few manage it with Burke’s special eloquence, at once melancholic and macabre.
-Bill Ott