From Library Journal
Burke's Billy Bob Holland is back, defending loser Wilbur Pickett against accusations of having stolen from powerful Earl Dietrich.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The second entry in Burke's new Billy Bob Holland series, following Cimarron Rose (1997), exhibits many of the author's strengths: lyrical prose, an elegiac tone, and a complex, tormented hero whose attraction to violence surfaces under the guise of protecting the weak. This time Billy Bob, Texas Ranger turned lawyer in Deaf Smith, Texas, tangles with a classic Burke villain: the rich guy whose polished veneer masks a lifetime of brutality. Complicating matters are Billy Bob's still-smoldering attraction to the rich guy's wife and a West Side Storylike rivalry between Mexican American gang members and the dissolute sons of the town's wealthy class. "You live with ghosts," Billy Bob's friend tells him, referring to his inability to let the past go. Yes, he does, and so does Burke, whose mingling of past and present usually gives his books a mythic power and a tragic scope. This time, however, the ghosts get in the way: too many echoes to previous books, both Cimarron Rose and the Dave Robicheaux novels, and too much similarity between heroes dull the emotional impact of the story rather than enhancing it. Still, this is a strong novel on its own terms, if a mild disappointment to longtime Burke fans. Bill Ott
From Kirkus Reviews
A second rangy Texas crime opera (Cimarron Rose, 1997) from the Edgar-winning chronicler of bayou detective Dave Robicheaux. This time out, Deaf Smith attorney Billy Bob Holland is handling what looks like a little case: the defense of Wilbur Pickett, a resounding flop who's been accused by local Croesus Earl Deitrich of stealing $300,000 in bearer bonds and an antique watch. But nothing ever stays little for long in Burke's monumental novels, and this case simmers with rumors that the watch rightly belonged to rolling-stone Skyler Doolittle; that Deitrich accountant Max Greenbaum was at the point of challenging his boss's story when he was killed by gang-bangers in Houston; and that the power behind the dangerous games of a Deaf Smith gang called the Purple Hearts is Deitrich and his gay-bashing gay son Jeff. Billy Bob, still haunted by his high-school fling with Deitrich's wife Peggy Jeanan affair she seems indecently eager to resumecan't swing a dead cat around his homestead without hitting other predators and the little people they prey on. No sooner has rascally Deitrich pilot Bubba Grimes offered to give evidence against Deitrich than he breaks into the home of Wilbur's blind wife Kippy Jo, and she's facing murder charges for shooting him. And when Skyler, hustled into custody by another Deitrich plot, takes it on the lam, his escape ensnares both the fellow-convict who helps him and the sadistic deputy bent on tracking him down. It's all perfectly familiar to Burke's legion of fans, of coursefrom the ancient romance with the spoiled rich girl to the corruption of wealth and power to the violence seething inside gang-bangers and heroes alikeand it's all done to a turn. Forget Raymond Chandler. The obsessive return of Burke's ambitious themes, together with his characters' inexhaustible capacity for courage, tenderness, and rage, makes him the Faulkner of the American crime novel. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
Critical acclaim for James Lee Burke and the Billy Bob Holland Series:
"Burke is a master at setting mood, laying in atmosphere, all with quirky, raunchy dialogue that's a delight."
--Elmore Leonard
"Billy Bob Holland is as angst-ridden and morally shell-shocked as Dave Robicheaux ever was, but like Robicheaux, Holland's moral compass always points to true north...Don't miss out."
--Rocky Mountain News
"Burke [is] one of the best writers of our time. His plots build tension to such a pitch that it tempts one to rush through his books. But his writing demands that his works be savored."
--Denver Post
"Burke is known for the lush bayou cadences that give solid flesh to his longtime series hero, deputy sheriff Dave Robicheaux, and this prose style moves easily to the steamy precincts of southeast Texas."
--Chicago Sun-Times
From the Inside Flap
y layered novel of crime, character, and place from the two-time Edgar Award winner, Gold Dagger Award winner, and New York Times bestselling author of Sunset Limited.
Few writers in America today combine James Lee Burke's lush prose, crackling story lines, and tremendous sense of history and landscape. In Cimmaron Rose, longtime fans of the Dave Robicheaux series found that the struggles of Texas defense attorney Billy Bob Holland show Burke at his best in exploring classic American themes--the sometimes subtle, often violent strains between the haves and the have-nots; the collision of past and present; the inequities in the criminal justice system.
Heartwood is a kind of tree that grows in layers. And as Billy Bob's grandfather once told him, you do well in life by keeping the roots in a clear stream and not letting anyone taint the water for you. But in Holland's dusty little hometown of Deaf Smith,
From the Back Cover
Critical acclaim for James Lee Burke and the Billy Bob Holland Series:
"Burke is a master at setting mood, laying in atmosphere, all with quirky, raunchy dialogue that's a delight."
--Elmore Leonard
"Billy Bob Holland is as angst-ridden and morally shell-shocked as Dave Robicheaux ever was, but like Robicheaux, Holland's moral compass always points to true north...Don't miss out."
--Rocky Mountain News
"Burke [is] one of the best writers of our time. His plots build tension to such a pitch that it tempts one to rush through his books. But his writing demands that his works be savored."
--Denver Post
"Burke is known for the lush bayou cadences that give solid flesh to his longtime series hero, deputy sheriff Dave Robicheaux, and this prose style moves easily to the steamy precincts of southeast Texas."
--Chicago Sun-Times
About the Author
James Lee Burke is the author of eighteen previous novels, including the New York Times bestsellers Sunset Limited, Cimarron Rose, Cadillac Jukebox, Burning Angel, and Dixie City Jam. He lives with his wife in Missoula, Montana, and New Iberia, Louisiana.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
IT WOULD BE EASY TO SAY WE RESENTED EARL Deitrich because he was rich. Maybe to a degree we did. He grew up in River Oaks, down in Houston, in an enormous white mansion set up on a hillock surrounded by shade trees. Its size and seclusion separated it even from the Midas levels of wealth that characterized his few neighbors. But our problem with him was not simply his money.
He was an officer, on leave from the army, when he came to the town of Deaf Smith, up in the Texas hill country, where the working classes wrestled drill bits and waited tables and the new rich chewed on toothpicks at the country club. He used his wealth to hold up a mirror to our inadequacies and take Peggy Jean Murphy from our midst, then brought her back to us as his wife and possession, almost as though she were on display.
Peggy Jean Murphy, who was heart-breakingly beautiful, who lived in our dreams, who commanded such inclusive respect the roughest kids in the West End dared not make a loose remark about her lest they be punched senseless by their own kind.
Earl Deitrich made us realize that our moments on the dance floor with her at high school proms and the romantic fantasies we entertained about marriage to her had always been the vanity of blue-collar kids who had never been in the running at all. Maybe even the high school quarterback she'd loved before he'd been drafted and killed on the Mekong had not been in the running, either.
But that was a long time ago. I tried not to think about Peggy Jean anymore. She and Earl lived abroad and in Montana much of the year and I didn't have occasion to see them, or to regret the decisions that led me into law enforcement on the border and the months of unrecorded and officially denied nocturnal raids into Coahuila, where a playing card emblazoned with the badge of the Texas Rangers was stuffed into the mouths of the dead.
But try as I might, I would never forget the spring afternoon when Peggy Jean got down from the back of my horse and walked with me into a woods above the river and allowed me to lose my virginity inside her.
When I rose from her hot body, her pale blue eyes were empty, staring at the clouds above the pine tops. I wanted her to say something, but she didn't.
"I don't guess I got a lot of experience at this," I said.
She ran her hand down my arm and held my fingers. There were blades of grass on her shoulders and breasts.
"You were fine, Billy Bob," she said.
Then I knew she had not made love to me but to a soldier who had died in Vietnam.
"You want to go to a movie tonight?" I asked.
"Maybe tomorrow," she replied.
"I like you a whole lot. I know when you lose somebody, it takes a long--"
"We'd better go back now. We'll go to the movie tomorrow. I promise," she said.
But no one competes well with ghosts. At least no one in our town did, not until Earl Deitrich arrived.
Earl and Peggy Jean's house was rumored to have cost twelve million dollars to build. It was three stories high, concave in shape, inset in a scooped-out hillside, the yard terraced with tons of flagstone. The front was filled with windows the size of garages, framed by white-painted steel beams. Ninety-foot skinned and lacquered ponderosa logs were anchored at angles from the roof to the ground, so that at a distance the house looked like a giant, gold-streaked tooth couched in the hills.
It was spring, on a Thursday, when I drove my Avalon out to their house for lunch. I had never felt comfortable around Earl, even though I did my best to like him, but she had left a handwritten note in the mailbox at my law office, saying they were back in town and would love to see me.
So I drove across the old iron bridge on the river, back into the hills, then through a cattleguard and down a long green valley whose fields were covered with buttercups and bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush. As I approached the house I saw a sun-browned, blond man in khakis and scuffed boots and a cut-off denim shirt setting fence posts around a horse lot that had been nubbed down to dirt.
His name was Wilbur Pickett and he had failed at almost every endeavor he had ever undertaken. When he tried to borrow money to start up a truck farm, his own mother told everybody in town Wilbur couldn't grow germs on the bottom of his shoe.
He wildcatted down in Mexico and set fire to a sludge pit next to the rig, then the wind blew the flames through a dry field and burned down the local police chief's ranch house. Wilbur barely got back across the border with his life.
In the Flint Hills of eastern Kansas, after a blistering 110-degree day, he unloaded an eighteen-wheeler full of hogs in rest pens without noticing the rails were down on the far side. Then watched them fan across the hills into three counties under a sky spiderwebbed with lightning.
But when it came to horses and bulls, Wilbur could come out of a rodeo chute like his pants were stitched to their hides. He broke mustangs in Wyoming and went seven seconds with Bodacious, the most notorious bull on the professional circuit (Bodacious would pitch the rider forward, then rear his head into the rider's face and crush the bones in it). Wilbur's face had to be rebuilt with metal plates, so that it now looked chiseled, the profile and jawline faintly iridescent, as though there were chemicals in his skin.
I stopped my car and waited for him to walk over to the window. His gray, shapeless cowboy hat was sweat-stained around the base of the crown. He took it off and wiped his brow and smiled.
"I got a pipeline deal down in Venezuela. Twenty or thirty grand can get you in on the ground floor," he said.
"I bet," I said.
"How about sluice mining in British Columbia? I'm talking about float gold big as elks' teeth, son."
"How's the weather up there in January?"
"Beats the hell out of listening to rich people tell you how much money they got," he said.
"See you, Wilbur."
"Jobbing out like this? Temporary situation. I'm fixing to make it happen."
He grinned, full of self-irony, and pulled his work gloves from his back pocket and knocked the dust out of them against his palm.
Peggy Jean and Earl had other guests that afternoon, too--a United States congressman, a real estate broker from Houston, a member of the state legislature, their wives, and a small, nervous, dark-haired man with a hawk's nose and thick glasses and dandruff on the shoulders of his blue suit.
Peggy Jean wore a white sundress with purple and green flowers on it. She had always been a statuesque girl and the years had not affected her posture or figure. There was a mole by the side of her mouth, and her hair was the color of mahogany, so thick and lustrous you wanted to reach out and touch it when she walked by.
She saw me looking at her from across the room. I went into the kitchen with her and helped her make a pitcher of iced tea and a second pitcher of lemonade. She washed a bowl of mint from the garden, then trimmed the sprigs with scissors and handed me two of them to put in the lemonade. The tips of her fingers were wet when she touched my palm.
"Earl's going to talk business with you," she said.
"He can talk it all he wants," I said.
"You don't do civil law?"
"Not his kind."
"He can't help where his family's money came from," she said.
"You're looking great, Peggy Jean," I said.
She picked up the tray and walked ahead of me onto the side porch, which was furnished and built to look like an eating area in a simple home of sixty years ago. The walls were unpainted slat board, the ceiling posts wood and lathed with bulbous undulations in them; the long plank table was covered with a checkered cloth; an old-time icebox, with oak doors and brass handles, stood in the corner; a bladed fan turned lazily overhead. I stood by the open window and looked at Wilbur Pickett dropping a shaved and beveled fence post into a hole.
"Last year I inherited half a city block in downtown Houston," Earl said to me, smiling, a glass of iced tea in his hand. He was a handsome man, at ease in his corduroys and soft burnt-orange shirt, his fine brown hair combed like a little boy's across his forehead. There was nothing directly aggressive about Earl, but his conversation always had to do with himself, or what he owned, or the steelhead fishing trips he took to Idaho or up on the St. Lawrence River. If he had any interest in anyone outside his own frame of reference, he gave no sign of it.
"But it's my worst nightmare," he went on. "A failed savings and loan had the lease on the site. The government seized the savings and loan, and I can't do anything with the property. The government doesn't pay rent on seized properties and at the same time I have a six-figure tax obligation on the land. Can you believe that?"
"This has something to do with me?" I asked.
"It might," he replied.
"Not interested," I said.
He winked and squeezed my forearm with two fingers. "Let's eat some lunch," he said.
Then he followed my gaze out to the horse lot where Wilbur was working.
"You know Wilbur?" he said.
"I've bought horses from him."
"We'll invite him in."
"You don't need to do that, Earl," I said.
"I like him." He cut his head philosophically. "Sometimes I wish I could trade places with a guy like that," he said.
I was soon to relearn an old lesson about the few very rich people I had known. Their cruelty was seldom deliberate, but its effect was more injurious than if it were the result of a calculated act, primarily because the victim was made to understand how insignificant his life really was.<...
