Feast day of fools : a novel

 by James Lee Burke. *Starred Review* Bad guys in James Lee Burke's fiction tend to be very bad, human incarnations of evil, manifestations of something deep in our lizard brain, something that will not be civilized, that craves only chaos. In this latest Hackberry Holland title, starring the seventysomething reformed drunk and whoremonger, now sheriff in a small southwest Texas border town, the bad guys are still very bad, but they have become more multidimensional, human impulses at war with the lizard core. Chief among the antagonists this time is Preacher Jack Collins, Holland's nemesis, presumed dead at the end of Rain Gods (2009) but now risen from the desert, still toting the Thompson machine gun with which he attempts to exorcise a lifetime of demons. But this is anything but a mano-a-mano conflict. Holland and his chief deputy, Pam Tibbs, are tracking a disaffected Homeland Security scientist in possession of secrets that a wealth of bad guys Mexican drug dealers, Russian mobsters would happily peddle to al-Qaeda. At the center of it all is a mysterious Chinese woman, Anton Ling, who operates a kind of underground railroad for illegals but who is an object of fascination for all the principals, from Holland to Preacher Jack to a Mexican gang leader obsessed with finding a way to bless his dead children. As Burke steers the elaborately structured narrative toward its violent conclusion, we are afforded looks inside the tortured psyches of his various combatants, finding there the most unlikely of connections between the players. This is one of Burke's biggest novels, in terms of narrative design, thematic richness, and character interplay, and he rises to the occasion superbly, a stand-up guy at the keyboard, as always. --Booklist (Check Catalog)