{"id":3396,"date":"2025-10-08T13:57:22","date_gmt":"2025-10-08T20:57:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=3396"},"modified":"2025-10-08T13:57:22","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T20:57:22","slug":"a-14-year-old-girl-tackles-the-forces-of-evil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=3396","title":{"rendered":"A 14-year-old girl tackles the forces of evil"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Lee Burke has a new novel out, so, fortunately for Burke fans and anyone looking for a good historical mystery\/thriller to read, Bob Moyer has a new review.<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Robert P. Moyer<\/p>\n

DON\u2019T FORGET ME, LITTLE BESSIE. By James Lee Burke. Atlantic Monthly Press. 360 pages. $28.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Reading\u00a0a James Lee Burke novel takes a little longer than reading the average novel. Not that he\u2019s a bad writer. He\u2019s one of the best American novelists writing today. No, it\u2019s his superlative prose \u2013 a phrase, a metaphor, a piece of dialogue, a description of landscape \u2013 so stunning that it makes the reader stop to admire it. Burke writes sentences no one has heard before.<\/p>\n

All that elegance doesn\u2019t hinder the narrative, however. His prose powers an engaging, unpredictable story, another chapter in the story of the Texas Holland family. He\u2019s written about Hackberry Holland before \u2014 drunkard, war hero, former Texas Ranger, womanizer: \u201cThe past was always calling him, like specters on horseback beckoning in the distance.\u201d This is the story of his daughter, 14-year-old Bessie. She\u2019s a force of nature who, in the course of this novel set in the early 20th<\/sup> century, shoots a man in the knee, shoots up a saloon, moves to New York, suffers a rape, and comes back home to negotiate an oil lease and start a film company.<\/p>\n

Bessie, however, is more than the heroine of a roller-coaster, rollicking tale. This is a James Lee Burke novel, all about good and evil. Bessie is the force of good, who tackles the bad guy, straightens out the saloon habitues, stands up to the sheriff and faces down the big oil company. Although evil takes on many faces in a Burke novel, there is one man who manifests the most evil of all \u2014 Indian Charlie, named for all the Indians he killed. He and Bessie have a handful of encounters ending in a final conflagration that tops anything Burke has written before.<\/p>\n

As he does in most of his novels, Burke slips in a touch of supernatural, a character named Mr. Slick, who shows up from time to time to help Bessie out of a bind. Bessie has a few visions as well. Burke\u00a0also puts a perspective on events that resonates with our current battle between good and evil. When Bessie goes to New York, she runs into \u201c\u2026 people who call themselves Christians but who are no different than the depraved souls who ran the Inquisition.\u201d\u00a0Back home in Texas, she encounters \u201cwhite people\u201d who \u201c\u2026weren\u2019t worth the dustpan it takes to dump them in a wastebasket.\u201d Burke speaks of the times, and to our times, when he writes: \u201cYou can burn the written word, but not the spoken one.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s possible that Don\u2019t Forget Me, Little Bessie<\/em> is the best book in the saga of the Holland family.<\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Lee Burke has a new novel out, so, fortunately for Burke fans and anyone looking for a good historical mystery\/thriller to read, Bob Moyer has a new review. Reviewed by Robert P. Moyer DON\u2019T FORGET ME, LITTLE BESSIE. By James Lee Burke. Atlantic Monthly Press. 360 pages. $28. Reading\u00a0a James Lee Burke novel takes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1356,9,5,426,14],"tags":[1486,1318,191,1488,1487],"class_list":["post-3396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime-fiction","category-historical-fiction","category-mysteries","category-popular-fiction","category-thriller-suspense","tag-historical-mystery","tag-holland-family","tag-james-lee-burke","tag-mystery-thriller","tag-southwestern-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3396"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3398,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3396\/revisions\/3398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}