Review: The Jealous Kind

The Jealous Kind by James Lee Burke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

While this James Lee Burke story revolves around a high school kid in the early 50s in Texas, it is no less serious than one of his Robicheaux stories. And the word serious could be capitalized here. The teen, Aaron Broussard, gets involved in theft, murder, suicide, terror, insanity, the mob, hitmen, Nazis and old spies, multiple gangs of bad guys, a lost million dollars, and a pretty girl. Or two. It was kind of like a story of a teen aged Robicheaux, with a goofy best friend ala Clete Purcell, getting into the same kinds of messes that Robicheaux routinely got into in his stories, but with a teen’s way of looking at things. The seriousness was a bit overwrought for the story, I thought. The story had a few too many parts to the plot that didn’t add much. And this wasn’t as moody as Robicheaux stories, mainly because 1950s Houston isn’t as much of a character as New Orleans and rural Louisiana. Burke’s other mysteries include the location as a kind of character, but here the location didn’t matter much to the story. Without the mention of icehouses and rodeos, this could have been about anywhere else. Looking forward to Burke’s next one.

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