In The Moon of Red Ponies Book

James Lee Burke's thrillers are all about regrets for sins you have to live with. In the Moon of Red Ponies is almost crowded with men trying to atone. As well as Burke's burned-out Texas Ranger, Billy Bob Holland, we have crazed rodeo rider Wyatt Dixon, the villain of Burke's earlier Bitterroot who is now trying to make up for burying Holland's wife alive. There is counter-intelligence-thug-turned-cop Darrel, a racist lout haunted by the things he did for his country, and Johnny American Horse, whose environmental activism is largely directed by visions and who is aware he has involved too many of his friends and lovers in things that may get them killed. Burke is brilliant on these men and their inability to trust each other; he is less good at thinking himself into the heads of the book's real villains, the men in suits who find and hire killers and despoil the land. It seems odd to complain of this in a book so full of shootings and torture and desperate flights across wild country--but some of the scenes in which sinister corporations damage lives with a stroke of the pen are melodramatic in a way that is not always worthy of a writer as sensitive to nuance as Burke. --Roz KaveneyRead More