In the mix this week are crusty old guys and nice young women

Editor’s note:  Anita Paddock’s review of books we should read are scheduled to appear on the second and fourth Friday of each month. Enjoy.

review by Anita Paddock

One look at the back cover of James Lee Burke’s newest novel, “Rain Gods,” will remind you that Burke is growing old. With a face crisscrossed with lines that look like a dried up river bed, Burke reminds us, as the old saying goes, of an old man who has been rode hard and put up wet.

But there is also a spark of gentleness gathered there in the eyes of this talented writer of mysteries who has faced and conquered his own personal demons.

And that’s what the reader will find in “Rain Gods”: a mixture of crusty old guys, good and bad, some fairly nice younger women, and an old sheriff with popping knees and a bad back, trying to keep his West Texas county from falling prey to the bad guys.

A former lawyer and drunk, Sheriff Hackbury Holland, a Korean War vet, who has never fully shaken off the cold and misery of spending time in a Korean War POW camp, responds to a 911 call that leads him to a shallow burial ground of nine young Thai women, some covered with dirt while still alive.

This scene of horror propels the story into a tale of bad men run out of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina to the Badlands of Texas and Mexico. The meanest bad guy of all is Preacher Jack Collins, a crazy character who puzzles his partners, as well as his enemies, with advice dotted with bible verses and themes from the holy scripture.

Readers will be quick to make a comparison of this book to Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men.” In both novels, an old sheriff chases a sociopathic killer who’s trying to kill a young man who’s really not all that bad of a guy, and in so doing, he kills a bunch of other people. But Burke is no McCarthy, and his long descriptions and tedious metaphors sometimes overegg the custard. But it’s a good story, and you don’t want to skip a page because something happens on nearly every one. In the end, the old sheriff is the hero. And for folks on the other side of 60, it does our hearts proud.

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Fort Smith police officer, Vincent Clamser, who is assigned to the patrol division, moved here with his family five years ago from Oklahoma City. His New York mother-in-law sends him detective novels to read by authors like Michael Connelly and James Lee Burke. He enjoys those, but his wife recently suggested he read the Twilight series.  And guess what? He loved them.
Go figure.

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