Rain Gods

• Publisher:   Simon & Schuster
• Number Of Pages:   448
• Publication Date:   2009-07-14
• ISBN-10 / ASIN:   1439128243
• ISBN-13 / EAN:   9781439128244

James Lee Burke, a rare winner of two Edgar Awards, and named Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, is the author of twenty-eight previous novels and two collections of short stories, including such New York Times bestsellers as Swan Peak, Tin Roof Blowdown, Last Car to Elysian Fields and Crusader's Cross.  He lives in Missoula, Montana, and New Iberia, Louisiana.

I've read a lot of James Lee Burke over the years (all of the Dave Robicheaux novels anyway) and this book may be his best that I've ever had the pleasure to read. In this book, Hackberry Holland is an aging sheriff in a southern Texas border town. He is called to a site in which he finds a shallow set of graves of women killed. Holland, a tough aging Korean War veteran is aware that this horrible crime is going to lead to some really bad people who have seriously bad intentions. I'm not sure I have read a book with a more disturbing character than "Preacher Collins." He was as frightening to me as the bad guy was in "No Country for Old Men." This book has some similarities (aging sheriff, drugs, a seriously bad/evil sociopath, etc...), but this book is far different in many ways. Burke's ability to describe a setting, a person, a room and scene is so vivid at times that you feel like you are there watching it all unfold. The book has a lot of characters all intertwined in the crime that took the lives of the women buried in those shallow graves. It's a great read and a book I won't soon forget. Hackberry Holland is a character that I want to read more of in the future.

I am a big fan of Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels, but it has been years since I read Lay Down My Sword and Shield, the first book about Hackberry Holland, and I don't remember it that well. I do remember finding it more "literary" than the Robicheaux books, and that vague memory is born out by Rain Gods. This book is not a mystery. It's almost a thriller, though the slow, rolling language doesn't quite suit that genre, either, and for long periods little happens. In fact, that is the one real weakness of this book as far as I can see: several times Burke winds up the tension, then lets it go without anything happening. This happens on several levels--killings that don't go off, personal relationships that don't make it to the next level, etc--and while the actions do suit the characters, they don't make for the best reading experience. Of course, when he does choose to display the violence, Burke doesn't shy away from it, and there are some exceptionally violent scenes in this book. The language itself is beautiful, and the poetry of it is even more evident because it's often used to describe such stark brutality. The story is an intriguing one that will keep you going until the end, it's only the pacing and the sometimes frustrating lack of activity that took a star off this for me.

My husband loved several of Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels, and I liked the one I read. So when Amazon Vine made this book available to me, I grabbed it as if they were offering free chocolate chip cookies. I was gratified to discover that, as the Amazon description intimated, this is a standalone book, not part of a series (though it certainly could be the first book in a new series). The essence of the story: nine women are killed and buried outside a church in a southwest Texas town. The sheriff aims to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice. The tale is told from the viewpoints of everybody involved, so the mystery is less "Who did it?" than "How will Sheriff Holland discover the truth?" Bottom line: I'm glad I read it, but this novel won't go into my pile of "must read again, more carefully next time" books. Successful fiction writers will tell you that great authors can rely on one of several strengths, such as plain ol' storytelling ability, a strong voice (the best example may be The Princess Diaries), dialog mastery, or -- as James Lee Burke so eloquently demonstrates -- an incredible ability to create and describe a setting. He really blows me away at this; in just a few sentences, Burke can make a place come alive, and bring the reader into that world. You FEEL the place as if you're there: "There was a storm breaking on the southern horizon like a great cloud of green gas forked with lightening that made no sound. The air had turned the color of tarnished brass as the barometer had dropped and Preacher could taste the salt in the wind and smell the shrimp that had been caught inside the waves and left stranded on the sand among the ruptured blue air sacs of the jellyfish." Whew. Even Burke's run-on sentences are part of the way he creates a mood. The problem for me is that it's not usually a very comfortable mood. I am reading outside my genre, here. I love mysteries (as you'll see by perusing my other reviews). But I rarely read crime novels, though there are some exceptions (Amazon Vine helped me discover the incredibly funny books of Marshall Karp, for instance -- start with The Rabbit Factory). Rain Gods is an incredibly well written book... and it quite literally gave me nightmares. I learned not to read this book right before I went to sleep, because his powerful imagery snuck into my dreams, and very few of the people in this story are cheerful bouncy folks without a care in the world. Um, like none of them actually. Everyone in the book, even the good guys like the sheriff, has his emotional baggage. Burke does so well getting the reader (me) into the heads of everyone, even the bad guys, that their moral blank spaces drip off the page. The violent scenes are not PG-rated, and because Burke is so eloquent with scene painting that didn't help my sleep any. But all that may make you love this book. If you're up for a Good Guys versus Bad Guys story, and you aren't shy about reading about brutal murders... I don't think you could find better writing than this.

Burke's best is great company, of course. In the decades since the first Dave Robicheaux novel, Burke has seldom been disappointing, but this is one of those books to re-read and enjoy, like Burning Angel, Confederate General... or Sunset Limited. Hackberry Holland is a brilliant creation, a dignified old man with spiritual baggage painful and touching. He has none of Dave's electric violence; it's easy to imagine Clint Eastwood playing him, almost type-casting. The Preacher is an extraordinary villain in a bookshelf of extraordinary villains: as nearly supernatural as the monsters Dave has faced this time and that, as psychotically rational, and yet oddly appealing, like a starved tarantula in a cage. He may be the only over-the-top dangerous hitman who gets beaten up twice by "girls." In fact, we meet him when he is being shot in the foot by a feisty teenage folk singer (which leads to a hundred pages of limping and crutches worthy of Carl Hiaissen), and when we are sure he's about to wipe out the family of a minor character, he ends up driven from the house by a housewife with a hot cooking pot. The novel is wonderfully elegaic and charming, for all the moments of horror. All the right people survive, and all the right ones end up dead, with few exceptions. There is something almost sweet about the friendliness of the book. Make no mistake: The world is full of horrors, but decency is not helpless, not overwhelmed, and can endure. And that is the whole point, I think. Another reviewer beat me to the punch with the observation, but the connection between this book and No Country for Old Men is tight. It is almost as if Burke decided he could write that book the way it should have been written. And succeeded. Where McCarthy's Joe Ben Bell (whatever) is a tired, hopeless, gut-scratching Dub Taylor (not the noble Tommy Lee of the movie) Hack Holland is a study in contrast, determined that the one thing "Old Men" may not do is give up. The lineup of connections is actually fun. Pete and the boy who finds the money, the Gaddis girl and the boy's wife, the two psychopaths, the ICE agents.... Under the layers of invention and difference, at the level of what it has to say about the human condition, it's the same book with the opposite conclusions. Burke has been the master, the one to beat, for mystery writers these last two decades. If he's decided to hang up his guns -- and I doubt that -- what better way than with the charming, amusing, thoughtful book.

"Rain Gods," by the mega-talented James Lee Burke, is another in his series of Texas-set mysteries that began with Cimarron Rose (Billy Bob Boy Howdy), centered on Billy Bob Holland. However, the book at hand gives us Hackberry Holland, the sheriff of a rural southwest Texas county near the Mexican border. Hackberry's an older relative of Billy Bob's, who is relegated to being merely an offstage presence. The first thing that must always be said about Burke is he's a very fine writer, and his presence among American mystery authors is definitely a gift from some gods or another. His descriptive, nature writing is always outstanding; his narrative writing and dialog are snappy, and he always gives us intricate, many-layered plots. The second thing to be said about the author is that, at this point in his career, he doesn't seem particularly concerned about commercial success, and he's writing what he feels he must on an inmost level, repeating several basic set-ups, themes, and characters, in this novel, as well as his most recent others that I have read. And a big third thing is that he's currently writing two series, the other being his better-known Dave Robichaux series that I believe began with the New Orleans set The Neon Rain: A Dave Robicheaux Novel , and now seems to have wandered to Montana. And whereas Burke is always an exceptional writer, he's a native of the New Orleans area, and a longtime resident there, and his New Orleans work is unrivaled in his repertory: the nature and landscape descriptions; the descriptions of people, food and drink; the use of the particular Creole argot of the land. Now, I know, writers must grow, expand themselves, etc., but I just love the New Orleans mise-en-scene, and miss it in his work set elsewhere. Especially as it is particularly striking that Burke seems to have wandered into Cormac McCarthy country here. The Texas landscape seems right out of the book, No Country for Old Men that admittedly, I haven't read; McCarthy's not my cuppa; and the movie of the same title, No Country for Old Men, that I have seen (and it's still not my cuppa.) The character of the older, world-weary sheriff is also familiar from "No Country," and so is the young man, Pete Flores, who plays an important part in "Rain Gods." So it's this reader's prayer: James Lee Burke, won't you please come home?

password = queenmagic

Bookmark Rain Gods

Hyperlink code: