James Lee Burke "Rain Gods"

I've remarked elsewhere that James Lee Burke could probably come up with a convincing and totally chilling psychopath and/or sociopath in his sleep. The Dave Robicheaux novels are literally crawling with 'em, and there's a liberal sprinkling across his other titles as well.

With that ability to conjure them up there may be a willingness to kill them off, which makes me hope the other lead character in the Hackberry Holland series proves to be an exception to the rule.

One hopes that the final Hackberry Holland novel has already been written, and is scheduled for posthumous publication because on the basis of Feast Day of Fools and Rain Gods I hope we're in for an extended series that won't quite be the same if he manages to definitively kill off the Preacher..

Rain Gods slipped by unnoticed two years ago, and my enjoyment of Feast Day of Fools meant I had no choice to go back and read the prequel, and the reading experience was definitely worth it. A glance at the James Lee Burke Wikipedia entry has a Dave Robicheaux scheduled for next year and I've got my fingers crossed in the hope of a Hackberry Holland in 2013.

The landscape along the Texas/Mexico border is probably the appropriate environment for a bible-quoting sociopathic psychopath, and there's probably quite a few of them lurking out there in the border badlands, but one hopes there aren't too many like Preacher Jack Collins out there in the flesh.

I'm not aware of any literary or personal link between Burke and Warren Zevon, and the I'll Sleep When I'm Dead Zevon biography doesn't feature an index but reading these two stories it certainly seems there's a fair bit of the old eternal Thompson gunner still stalking through the night here.

With nine illegal aliens machine gunned and buried in a shallow grave behind a church, and Iraq veteran, Pete Flores, and his girlfriend, Vikki Gaddis on the run from a collection of players who want them removed from the picture, terminated, as the saying goes, with extreme prejudice Sheriff Holland and Deputy Pam Tibbs set out to piece together a picture that's complicated by personal agendas and vendettas among a variety of underworld influences.

It's a complex jumble of threads with Preacher Jack at the centre of things, a psychopath who seems to see himself as an avenging angel and manages to draw information from a variety of reliable sources that lesser mortals such as you and I might be inclined to dismiss.

So, with Pete Flores and Vikki Gaddis on the run from the people on the fringes of the killings (Pete was involved, and knows a bit too much for his own good), the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other forces of nominal law and order who are pursuing their own larger agendas and Hackberry Holland, haunted by back pain, Korean War nightmares and obsessive memories of his late wife, Rie, most writers would have left it at that and proceeded from there.

Burke, on the other hand, starts with a dozen major characters and half a dozen plot lines, throws extra players into the mix where needed, brings them back as necessary and ties things together rather deftly at the end, leaving enough room for Preacher Jack to reappear in Feast Day of Fools as the Epilogue notes sightings of an emaciated man who foraged in landfills and Dumpsters and wore rags that were black with grime and a rope for a belt and whose beard grew in a point to the middle of his chest.

After a spell in the wilderness, you just know, even without having read the sequel, that he'll be back.

Once again, Burke demonstrates his skill as a master storyteller, writing with a clarity most of us would envy and few could hope to emulate and delivering a multifaceted story where nothing is quite what it seems and tortured souls operate in their own distinct and strangely moral universe.

A masterpiece that deserves to be reread to pick up the details you missed last time around…as the reader savours the elegant mastery of language on offer. One might be tempted to apply tags like his best so far, but when each successive volume attracts the tag it seems easier to say another James Lee Burke and leave it at that.

James Lee Burke "Feast Day of Fools"

Here's a perfect example of Hughesy's need to write something down to remind himself of what he's read. Feast Day of Fools is the third title inJames Lee Burke's Hackberry Holland series, and while I have a copy of 1971's Lay Down My Sword And Shield on the shelves, there's no sign of 2009's Rain Gods in the same area, though I have vague memories of reading a Burke title from the Gold Coast Library at some stage over the past couple of years.

Then again, there's quite possibly a copy sitting in a pile of books over at The Actor's place, but whatever version of reality applies here there's something missing in the sequence as far as Hughesy's memory is concerned, and where a James Lee Burke series is concerned those memory factors are a key ingredient in the enjoyment of the reading process.

While it's not totally necessary to read these books in sequence, and latecomers to the eighteen-title Dave Robicheaux series are going to have difficulty in that regard, there's always a degree of carry over from one title to the next and while each title stands comfortably on its own there are nuances in there that only really come out if you've read the preceding title.

That applies a little more than it usually does in this case. We first encountered Hackberry Holland, cousin of Texas attorney Billy Bob Holland (Cimarron Rose, Heartwood, Bitterroot, In the Moon of Red Ponies) as far back as the 1970s in Lay Down My Sword and Shield, though there's a fair time lapse between that story of a Texan attorney and Korean War POW being pushed by his wife, his brother, and friends in the oil business to run for Congress and becomes caught up in a civil rights conflict and the later volumes.

In the intervening period since the early days of the United Farm Workers he's been a civil rights lawyer and ended up after the death of his wife as the local sheriff in a small community on the border between Texas and Mexico.

Rain Gods takes place in that setting with the machine-gunned bodies of nine young Thai women found in a shallow grave behind a church, an Iraq veteran and his girlfriend running for their lives, a serial killer known as Preacher Jack Collins, the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and assorted cold-blooded killers running along intersecting plot lines (in these cases Google is your friend) as Sheriff Holland and his deputy Pam Tibbs try to figure things out.

References to those nine Thai women and your actual Preacher Jack turn up again in Feast Day of Fools, and while you don't actually need to know the back story from last time around it'd definitely help when it comes to elucidating the tricky and apparently long-standing interaction between Hack Holland and the bible-toting and quoting serial killer.

The action starts when Native American alcoholic semi-vagrant Danny Boy Lorca witnesses a man tortured to death in the desert, reports it to the authorities and the investigation leads more or less directly to the door of La Magdalena, Anton Ling, a mysterious Chinese woman known to assist illegal immigrants crossing the border.

While she claims to know nothing about the case, the dead man's companion, a government agent the killer had planned to sell to Al Qaeda, had sheltered there, and has now found his way into the company of serial murderer Preacher Jack. The killer, a former mercenary named Krill is haunted by the unbaptised deaths of his children, also turns up on her doorstep, as does his illiterate and psychopathic offsider Negrito and the Reverend Cody Daniels, an ex-convict who's looking for salvation and/or revenge (seemingly it's a case of whichever comes first).

Holland repeatedly turns up on the doorstep as well, apparently spellbound by La Magdalena's resemblance to his late wife, much to the dismay of Deputy Pam Tibbs who has her own interpersonal aspirations as far as Hack is concerned.

Psychopaths, illegal immigrants, drug smugglers and gun runners, Russian mobsters, corrupt employees of the federal government, figures from Hack’s distant past and immigrant-hating rednecks roam across the desolate landscape, and there are enough conflicts of interest to bring the strangest combinations into an uneasy alliance against mutual enemies before an enigmatic ending that sets things up for a sequel.

Burke is a master craftsman whose prose shimmers and deserves to be savoured, a story teller who gets better each new time around and Feast Day of Fools is right up there with his very best efforts.

Which, of course, from where I'm sitting ranks it right up there with the very best there is.

Peter Robinson "Before the Poison"

Having voraciously devoured almost everything in Peter Robinson's Inspector Banks series the sight of a new Robinson title in a book shop is almost invariably followed by a hit on the credit card balance.

A glance at the blurb on the back cover (a what's he got Banks into this time? sort of thing) suggested we were talking a Banks-free zone this time around, and the opening sequence, where convicted murderer Grace Fox in hanged in January, 1953 seemingly confirmed those suspicions.

Starting a story fifty-something years ago opens the possibility of a case reopened, so there could have been an opening for Banks in that regard, the accidental discovery of something that brings the case back to attention or something along those lines, but here the something is a house and the investigator isn't a police officer.

Yorkshire native Chris Lowe wants to return home after the death of his wife and buys an isolated semi-stately home (Kilnsgate House) sight unseen. After a successful career as a film score composer he has visions of working on his movie soundtracks there once he's managed to get this piano sonata out of the way.

Partly due to the aforementioned isolation, Kilnsgate has been largely unoccupied for close to sixty years, and Lowe discovers a few previously undisclosed details about the place from real estate agent Heather Barlow who turns up with a basket of supplies shortly after he has moved in.

Heather's marriage is on the verge of a break-up, and there's definitely a degree of chemistry evident from the start, so a mixture of introspective musing on past affairs and possible developments makes a significant counterpoint to Lowe's musings on a once notorious but now largely forgotten murder scandal with excerpts from Grace Fox's wartime journal and a volume of Famous Trials by Sir Charles Hamilton Morley which goes a long way to filling in the back story, which runs something like this:

On a wintry New Year's Eve a snowstorm isolates Kilnsgate House, where a dinner party has been followed by the sudden death of Dr Ernest Fox, the apparent victim of a heart attack. Allegations that Grace and her much younger lover planned to do away with her husband soon emerge, along with suggestions Dr Fox was about to take up a position in the south (a move that would separate the lovers). As it turns out, Grace and her husband seem to have quarrelled about the appointment, though the argument doesn't stem from the obvious motivation.

Grace is convicted and executed, the lover, an artist, moves to Paris where Lowe tracks him down and garners further details about the past, and the gradual unfolding of events leads Lowe to South Africa with the whole matter seemingly nutted out only to learn that he's barking up an entirely wrong tree.

Actually, he's "so far off target they'd have to send out a search party for the truth."

The truth, as it turns out, has been signalled fairly comprehensively on the way through, particularly in the latter sections of Grace's journal, and while there's no way of confirming the objective truth you're left (or at least I was) with the feeling that if it actually was homicide Grace's wartime experiences make it an understandable act.

Things aren't quite the way they seemed as far as Mr and Mrs Lowe are concerned either, and there's a neat twist involving the victims' son and his own offspring.

All in all, an intriguing read that isn't going to parlay itself into a series unless Robinson can pull some rather spectacular rabbits out of the authorial hat. It's difficult to see how Mr Lowe and Ms Barlow are going to find further cases to follow up, and this isn't a plot line that would have worked with Inspector Banks and his colleagues either.

Or rather, it might have, but you'd have to forego the Chris Lowe first person narrative, wouldn't you?

As stated, Before the Poison is an intriguing read that had me turning the pages over about a day and a half, which says something about Robinson's writing ability.