![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/feast-day-of-fools-james-lee-burkejpg-00c207668c7eecc4.jpg\" "\\"feast-day-of-fools-james-lee-burkejpg-00c207668c7eecc4\\"")
<\/a>In a James Lee Burke novel, the landscape always comes alive.\u00a0The Louisiana bayous where Deputy Sheriff Dave Robichaux parlays justice reek of the evil men do to each other and the land, the ground throbs with the march of unseen forces.\u00a0No venal sin disappears; it simply drops down into the soil, merges with the swamps.<\/p>\nIn Burke\u2019s latest series, the locale may change, but the allegory doesn\u2019t.\u00a0Sheriff Hackberry Holland holds sway over a patch of land in Southwest Texas where \u201c\u2026 from the time of Cortes to the present, a martial and savage spirit had ruled these hills and it was no coincidence that a sunset in this fine place looked like the electrified blood of Christ.\u201d\u00a0Hackberry wonders if something has not come into the loves of this reach of border country, \u201clike a spiritual malignancy irradiating the land with its poisonous substance, remaking the people in its image.\u201d<\/p>\n
Holland, a reformed reprobate cut from the same cloth as Dave Robichaux, brings quite a history to his beloved county \u2014 Korean vet, ex-congressman, civil rights lawyer, womanizer, lawman.\u00a0 He\u2019s past 80, and feels older \u201c\u2026in the way people feel old when they have more knowledge of the world than they need\u2026 If age had marked a change in him, it lay in his acceptance that loneliness and an abiding sense of loss were the only companions some people would ever have.\u201d\u00a0 He lives alone on his ranch and doesn\u2019t suffer fools.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, the fools find him anyway.\u00a0These are fools in the medieval sense, those \u201clover-level dysfunctional people in the church (who) were allowed to do whatever they wanted\u201d on the Feast Day of Fools. \u201cThey got it out of their system, and the next day they all came to church hungover and were forgiven.\u201d\u00a0 Now those same dregs trail their \u201c\u2026BO around the desert and terrorize unarmed people and pretend (to be) the scourge of God.\u201d<\/p>\n
They certainly are the scourge of Holland\u2019s life.\u00a0Most of them are after one man, Noie Barnum, a weapons designer who has developed \u201cproblems of conscience\u201d and will give his plans to foreign elements.\u00a0 A long list of people wants to buy, sell, kill, and\/or prevent him from doing so:\u00a0Krill, a mercenary from Central America who carries his dead, mummified children around in a box;\u00a0Josef Solokoff, a Russian criminal \u201cwho slithered through a hole in the immigration process during the\u00a0Cold War\u201d; Temple Dowling, the son of a senator, who makes missiles and moves on\u00a0little girls; and Preacher Jack Collins, who uses a Thompson submachine gun to silence the voice of his mother in his head.<\/p>\n
Unlike most other villains (straw men set up to propel a plot), Burke\u2019s bad guys have added dimension, including an inner dialogue that drives them.\u00a0They also trail after them traumatic backstories touched by America\u2019s past\u00a0\u201csins\u201d – the Cold War, Central America, corrupt government and child abuse, to name a few.\u00a0Holland takes them on with a cast of well-defined secondary characters: Pam, the deputy sheriff who would do anything for him day or night; Danny Boy, the town drunk who sees things in the desert; and Ethan Riser, an FBI agent on his way out of this life.\u00a0This conglomerate of righteous citizens foils the fools with a lot of firepower and the finest writing in current American literature.\u00a0Soon, the echo of gunshots will fade away, and Holland can enjoy his landscape, \u201ca cathedral in its own right,\u201d once again \u2014 until Burke comes up with another feast of fools.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bob Moyer reviews James Lee Burke’s latest offering, featuring Dave Robichaux, evil and fools. By Robert Moyer FEAST DAY OF FOOLS. By James Lee Burke. Simon and Schuster. 463 pages. $26.99 In a James Lee Burke novel, the landscape always comes alive.\u00a0The Louisiana bayous where Deputy Sheriff Dave Robichaux parlays justice reek of the evil […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,14],"tags":[192,191,184],"class_list":["post-615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mysteries","category-thriller-suspense","tag-dave-robichaux","tag-james-lee-burke","tag-mysteries-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615","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=615"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":617,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615\/revisions\/617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}