THE TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN

James Lee Burke (Orion £12.99)

Once you get the hang of the argot and the complicated, violent plot of James Lee Burke's 16th novel featuring Dave Robicheaux, you will agree that it is his most gripping and most moving tribute to his beloved New Orleans, the place that has always been for him "a song, not a city".

His anger is for those responsible for the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when Louisiana was reduced to "a Third World country... an ongoing national tragedy and probably an American watershed in the history of political cynicism".

He engages with the big political and social issues: the incompetence and neglect of the US Congress and the administration in Washington DC that "dramatically cut funding for the repair of the levee system only a few months earlier". But he reserves his passion for the most helpless and most vulnerable in society.

At the centre of the novel, Robicheaux, the charismatic Cajun detective and recovering alcoholic, wrestles with his anger and his demons, his rage and his stubbornness, which is balanced by his compassion and his understanding of human nature. He draws us into a world of lawlessness and greed, of race and class tensions that explode in the wake of the hurricane.

One of his most heartbreaking characters is his old friend Jude LeBranc, a priest and morphine addict. Trapped by the rising water, he tries to reach his congregation caught inside the church, but is mugged and left to drown by looters who make off with his boat.

Robicheaux traces the boat to four criminals who break into the home of Kovick, a wealthy mobster, and stumble on a hoard of drugs, money and blood diamonds. As they escape with the loot, one of the gang is killed and the other rendered a paraplegic. Otis, a mild-mannered insurance man, recognises the two Melancon brothers, who gang-raped his teenage daughter.

The question for Robicheaux is whether Otis is implicated in the shooting. Bernard Melancon is caught in a moral quagmire; unsure whether he is an avenger or a penitent, he longs to "expiate his sins" and turns, in desperation, to Robicheaux for help and redemption as his brother lies dying, barely alive.

Burke's novel of crime and redemption, love and despair is written in a Biblical style, in his distinctive poetic prose. It is a lament for a natural event that turns into an apocalyptic horror, "a holocaust in the making" as those around are caught in the anguish of "good and evil, forgiveness and revenge".