Another solid 5 star read from an author that writes some of the best books in my long reading history. His characters and their back stories all set the communities apart while giving a straight forward look at how much alike these small towns are.

I really enjoyed this novel but I've noticed recently I've read many of this series out of order based on what's available at my local library.
The supernatural creeps into many of the author's novels, sometimes insidiously, sometimes blatantly but always believably if that makes sense. The reader is left wondering if the main character actually believes that the supernatural has occurred or if it is explained away as a side effect of drunkenness or mental illness.
Another highly recommended read.

I love the Dave Robicheaux series by James Lee Burke but this was the first book I have read of his that isn't in that series. This is actually the third book in the series but can be read as a standalone. If you haven't read this author you are completely missing out.

1962: Aaron Holland Broussard has turned his back on his career in academia for the life of a migrant worker, taking a job as a hired hand on a farm near Denver. He wants to live a quiet, uncomplicated life, toiling on the land during the day and writing his novel at night. He isn’t looking for trouble, but when it finds him, he stands up for himself, and for the young waitress he’s fallen in love with.
Mr. Burke is a masterful story teller, and this is one of his finest. The writing is lush and vivid, and each character is fully formed and believable. The protagonist, a troubled Korean vet, is a Cajun Paladin, trying to set things right in one small corner of Colorado against almost impossible odds. The supernatural aspect so common to Burke’s novels blends seamlessly into the story. Highly recommended.

I received an eARC of this title from the publisher through NetGalley.

I kept seeing books by James Lee Burke and the description of this one really pulled me in. This was brilliantly written, as Burke's prose is breathtaking at times and always engaging. The story itself didn't really grab me though, and I felt it was more literary than I needed at the time. Still, the author's way with words makes the characters stick with you after finishing..

James Lee Burke is a powerful, literary writer whose characters are as well flushed out as any author writing today.

In this book we are treated to a look into the seamy/evil that a businessman wields in the American West. The mythology of the land is busted wide open. As the man sets his sights on Aaron, the protagonist of the book, he becomes drawn into a world of murder.

Aaron had come to Denver via railroad and met his soul partner, Joanne. She has been working with a sinister, drug involved professor.

All of this leads to a complex story that the characters must endure and see their way through.

An excellent read.

James Lee Burke never disappoints, and his new novel Another Kind of Eden, is no exception. He really is a master storyteller who brings characters to life and creates vivid scenes in a variety of settings. Highly recommended.

I sat on this book for months: why in the world would I wait to sit down and begin reading the latest James Lee Burke novel “ Another Kind Of Eden.” This novel introduces Aaron Holland Broussard, a highly-educated drifter and would-be novelist working as an itinerant ranch hand out west in the early 1960’s. There are highly textured characters in town, some good (but not many), a number of bad guys, mysterious deaths that may be connected to devil worship. Burke is one of the best writers I have ever run across and I found that once I began reading I kept reading till the end. So thanks to NetGalley for the great read and for those who haven’t yet read “Another Kind Of Eden” I am jealous that you have the joy of opening the first page…

Burke is a word artist and a master storyteller. This novel has such an engaging plot and is set in the western 60’s. The experience of this story is one I will savor.
Many thanks to Simon & Schuster and to NetGalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

Aaron Holland Broussard, our guide through through Another Kind of Eden, is an educated man in his 20s, working at being a writer, traveling the south and west on the rails in that faintly romantic way, jumping on empty boxcars and exiting where it looks right. This novel has elements of romance but also aspects of evil familiar to anyone who has read a James Lee Burke novel before. While this is my first time reading a book of the Holland family, I recognize themes that I have encountered reading the Dave Robicheaux novels. Aaron has damage to his soul just as Dave does.

And the prose is, as always, well done, describing battles of good versus evil or the lazily immoral, the effects of drugs in the early and growing drug culture of the 1960s, the horrors of violence and misogyny, and on and on. But also there is the beauty of the natural world, of life itself. Burke always looks at big pictures through his individual characters and their actions.

This was a 4.5* book for me rounded to 4. Recommended.

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review.

I don't generally go for the Wild Wild West but James Lee Burke wrote such a descriptively stunning story I was hooked. This is more than a drama; it's a study in how hard it is to make it in an uncaring world when everyone seems to be your enemy

Another Kind of Eden is kind of a strange book. It seems as if it is Fantasy, instead of Mystery & Thrillers. The first half of the book is unusual but may be chalked up to being slow. The second half is faster with the ending coming at a dizzying pace. Most of the time, I couldn’t figure out what was going on, and, yet I liked the book. It would stay with me the rest of the day after reading. It made me think about human frailty, discrimination, love in small towns and control.

It is worth the read to see how if affects you. Some will love it!


I received an ARC from Simon & Schuster through NetGalley. This in no way affects my opinion or rating of this book. I am voluntarily submitting this review and am under no obligation to do so.

James Lee Burke is one of my favorite authors and I look forward to reading any of the books that he publishes.

A story caught in a time where being on the outside throws attention your way, being a man of thought and desire marks your path. Aaron is on such a journey. A rambler who befriends two of the simplest of companions and catches heat simply by putting to words the guilt men carry. Aaron is now in Colorado and working a dairy farm gets caught up in a dispute involving the beginnings of the United Farm Worker , a local waitress, and a charismatic “Professor” who has followers keen to do his bidding. The dynamic is pure Burke. The story makes you stop and think. The tale of Aaron continues …

An intriguing approach to multiple genres at once: the western, the war novel, the Southern gothic, the whodunit, the bildungsroman. James Lee Burke's prose is as elaborate as ever, his observations of human nature as astute as they've always been. Fans will love it, but unlike the (magnificent) Robicheaux series, those looking for an outside the box thriller will be easily able to enter this world as first time Burke readers.

A book that takes place in Colorado...and in the 60's? So fun!

I have never read a book by James Lee Burke, and I am now a fan. This book is not the usual kind of book I would pick up and read. Plus, I had no idea it was part of a family sage, but it can definitely stand alone.

Aaron Holland Broussard, the main character, is a veteran who decided to jump off of the boxcar in Denver in the 60s. He ends up working on a farm, and meets a college student/artist that makes him see the beauty in life again. There is a lot of evil going on in this town; Broussard experiences a drug-induced cult, mysticism, and other sinister characters.

The author, Burke, has a beautiful way of writing. It was almost poetic in his descriptions, and the characters kept my interest. He definitely made me want to read his other books.

I gave this book four out of five stars. The ending was intense, but it also confused me in a way. That being said, it is definitely a book I recommend.

I was given this book for my honest review.

Published by Simon & Schuster on August 17, 2021

Another Kind of Eden takes place when Aaron Holland Broussard is 26. Aaron has been to war, earned a degree, and written a novel. He describes himself as “a failed English instructor.” Aaron was a teenager when he appeared in The Jealous Kind, one of my favorite James Lee Burke novels.

As a post-war drifter, Aaron “learned quickly that the Other America was a complex culture held together by the poetry of Walt Whitman, the songs of Woody Guthrie, and the prose of Jack Kerouac.” Aaron spends the spring and summer of 1962 working on a dairy and produce farm in Colorado. The owner, Jude Lowry, is a decent man. Aaron is sufficiently decent to resist the advances made by Lowry’s wife.

Aaron works with Spud Caudill and Cotton Williams, two men who have his back when he’s attacked for driving a truck that has a union sticker. The Sheriff, Wade Benbow, briefly locks up Aaron despite his correct suspicion that the fight was started by Darrel Vickers, whose father Rueben is a well-connected rancher. Darrel is suspected of killing a little girl by locking her in a refrigerator when he was still a child.

Aaron learns the identity of his attacker from Jo Anne McGuffy, a waitress who paints macabre scenes in her spare time. Her paintings are based on the Ludlow Massacre, a mass killing of striking workers perpetrated by anti-labor militia members in 1914. Over the course of the novel, Aaron falls in love with Jo Anne, although she’s sleeping with her professor, Henri Devos, and if Darrel is worthy of belief, has been his lover, as well.

The plot involves threats to various people, mostly women, including Jo Anne and some women on a hippie bus who are being pimped out. They hippies “were the detritus of a Puritan culture, one that made mincemeat of its children and left them marked from head to foot with every violation of the body that can be imposed on a human being: state homes, sexual molestation, sodomy, gang bangs, reformatory tats, fundamentalist churches . . . . Their hallmark was the solemnity, anger, and pain in their eyes.” Spud is a suspect when a hooker turns up dead (because Spud works so that he can afford to visit hookers), but Aaron has seen no evil in Spud’s heart. Another woman, one of the hippies on the bus, is hospitalized for reasons that nobody wants to discuss.

Aaron saw more than his share of evil during the Korean War; he blames himself for a loss of an MIA friend. Benbow saw his share when he liberated a subcamp of Dachau. The notion of evil as a force is a popular theme among thriller writers who try to understand and explain the human condition. Burke has turned to that theme again and again, sometimes envisioning evil as the offspring of the supernatural. There are supernatural elements in Another Kind of Eden, including a war buddy who appears from the dead and creates a miracle at a delicate moment. Apparent demons and glimpses of ghosts, perhaps real and perhaps not, pop up near the story’s end. While I could have done without the supernatural, I always appreciate Burke’s effort to comprehend the absence of compassion and decency in human behavior.

Aaron learns something about himself as he struggles against evil men. He comes to accept that “the Holland legacy of violence and mayhem had always lived inside me,” but the acceptance of his inner demons gives him peace without encouraging him to embrace the violence. He instead embraces the inevitability of death: “As Stephen Crane wrote at the close of The Red Badge of Courage, the great death was only the great death, not to be sought, not to be feared, but treated as an inconsequential player in the human comedy.”

The supernatural elements put me off a bit, making me rank Another Kind of Eden below Burke’s best work. But novels that are not Burke’s best are better novels than most crime writers can compose. Burke’s prose style and the depth of his thought make him one of my three favorite writers of crime fiction and one of the best writers of American fiction in or outside of any genre.

RECOMMENDED

James Lee Burke is a living legend, a novelist who’s won just about every prize there is, and whose published work has spanned more than fifty years. My thanks go to Net Galley and Simon and Schuster for the invitation to read and review. This book is for sale now.

Another Kind of Eden is a prequel to Burke’s Holland family trilogy. The time is the 1960s, and protagonist Aaron Holland Broussard is in Colorado working a summer job. He falls in love with a waitress named JoAnne, but there are obstacles to their happiness everywhere he looks. There’s a charismatic professor that won’t leave her alone, a bus full of drugged-out young people that have fallen under his influence, and of course, there’s corruption among the local wealthy residents, which is a signature feature in Burke’s work. Aaron is a Vietnam veteran, and he has residual guilt and grief that get in his way as well. He’s got some sort of an associative disorder, though I am not sure that’s the term used; at any rate, he blacks out parts of his life and cannot remember them. He also has anger issues, and he melts down from time to time; there’s an incident involving a gun that he forces a man to point at him that I will never get entirely out of my head, and kind of wish I hadn’t read.

I had a hard time rating this novel. If I stack it up against the author’s other titles, it is a disappointment; a lot of the plot elements and other devices feel recycled from his other work, dressed up a bit differently. But if I pretend that this is written by some unknown author, then I have to admit it’s not badly written at all. By the standards of Burke’s other work, it’s a three star book; compared to most other writers, it’s somewhere on the continuum between four and five. Since I have to come up with something, I decided to call it four stars.

All that being said, if you have never read anything by this luminary, I advise you to start with one of his earlier books--almost any of them, actually.

Aaron Holland Broussard is a 26 year old drifter with a lot of baggage. He has guilt over his wartime experiences, he has periodic blackouts and both psychological and alcohol-related problems and he hasn’t been able to get his book published. After he meets Jo Anne, a 20 year old artist/student/ waitress, he becomes completely besotted with her. Frankly, his reverence for her was kind of creepy and patronizing. The book also features a menacing father/son team, a dying sheriff, a bus load of hippies, murdered prostitutes, illegal drugs, a seductive employer and (maybe) ghosts. I had to read the last chapter twice, and I’m still not sure how all of this was wound up.

I love this author’s writing style. It’s full of unique descriptions and images (“Spud was a good soul, as homely as mud, as socially sophisticated as a dirty sock floating in a punch bowl.”) I listened to the audiobook narrated by Will Patton, and he is the perfect narrator for Burke’s books. Unfortunately, this wasn’t one of my favorite books by him. It became increasingly melodramatic and I didn’t really care for the supernatural touches. Burke has written about members of the Holland family in other books, but it is not necessary to read any of those books before reading this one. However, I don’t think this should be your first experience with this author. Try “Wayfaring Stranger” or one of the Dave Robicheaux books instead. 3.5 stars

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

Don’t worry if you haven’t read the previous books in the Holland family series. While they provide background, this reads as a standalone. And don’t be dismayed that this is not about the New Orleans detective, Dave Robicheaux, Burke’s more familiar character. Having grown up in Colorado, I always thought of Trinidad, as a place on a map, probably not worthy of a novel. I was wrong. Aaron Holland served in Korea. He has blackouts during which he can remember nothing he does and these episodes often involve violence on his part. This and his PTSD have led him to the life of the vagrant. Riding the rails, he ended up in Denver and eventually in Trinidad. Burke’s sparse language suits this character and his description of the mountains surrounding Trinidad create a visual in the reader’s mind. “The mountains around Trinidad were the deep metallic blue of a razor blade and seemed to rise straight and flat-sided into the clouds.” Aaron ends up working for a labor-union farmer. As a result, Holland suffers at the hands of a well-to-do Trinidad family. Much of the story centers involves the Ludlow Massacre in which John D. Rockefeller’s hired thugs and the Colorado National Guard killed striking miner’s and their families in 1914. Holland’s friendship and romance with talented artist, Anne McDuffy, reflects how the Massacre impacted families. Her father was one of the men killed and her artwork recreates the visual of children trapped in the fire. Like a number of Burke’s works this incorporates the supernatural into the real and it’s an important part of this book. I always struggle with books like this, and I’m still not sure what was real and what was part of the supernatural at the end of the book.