Rain Gods

Elegant Scenery and Graphic Violence

Rain Gods by James Lee Burke is the 2nd novel to feature Sheriff Hackberry Holland, though it took him thirty-eight years to make his reappearance. The book was long-listed for the Gold Dagger and won the 2014 International Deutscher Krimipreis.

Synopsis

Down on his luck, Iraq veteran Pete Flores is hired in a bar to help drive a truck on the Texas-Mexico border. Within a couple of hours, he realises that nothing good will happen on the trip; his coworker produces a Thompson submachine gun, and it becomes clear that the back of the truck he is driving is full of people.

Flores climbs down into an irrigation ditch to take a leak, then “keeps on going”, only to hear the sound of the machine gun. After making an anonymous call to the local sheriff’s department, Flores slips away. Shortly afterwards, his new workmates visit Flores’s girlfriend, Vikki Gaddis, wanting to speak to him.

The next day Sheriff Hackberry Holland follows up on the call and uncovers the bodies of nine Thai prostitutes. They had been gunned down, then buried by a bulldozer, whilst at least one of them wasn’t quite dead.

Meanwhile, Flores and his girlfriend flee from the law, the mob and a psychotic hitman.

Review

James Lee Burke’s Rain Gods is a robust combination of stunning landscapes, brutal violence, and the occasional literary distraction.

Pete entered the paintless frame house they rented, one that sat inside the blue shadow of a hill when the sun rose above the horizon as hot and sultry as a broken egg yolk, the light streaking across the barren land.

Every chapter of the book builds to a tense climax as the sheriff, federal agents, mob bosses and hitmen roam through Burke’s evocative scenery, trying to find and eliminate the naive veteran and his shrewd girlfriend.

Ageing Sheriff Hackberry Holland makes an engaging hero as a man coming to the end of his career, though his backstory of war, alcohol and women is a little formulaic. His nemesis, the unnerving contract killer, “Preacher” Jack Collins, is far more arresting. The Preacher is a former pest exterminator who believes he is God’s enforcer. As the story builds up to each of his executions, you are never sure how his obscure ethical code will guide his decisions and whether the source of his ire will live or die. This creates a disconcerting edge to the story.

Curiously, Burke co-opts three women to be the bravest characters in the story. Neither a police deputy, a mob-land wife, nor a waitress has any time or sympathy for the Preacher or his quasi-religious fervour. Their refusal to be cowed by his atrocities initiates his downfall.

Though truth be told, the leading protagonist of the book is the Preacher. By the time you reach the end, you will be hoping he gets away.

Excerpt

As he lay in a bed with a view of a chicken yard, a railed pen with six goats inside it, and a bladeless, rusted slip of a windmill strung with dead brush blown from a field of weeds, the man whose nickname was Preacher could not get the woman out of his mind, nor the scent of her fear and sweat and perfume while he wrestled with her on the ground, nor the expression on her face when she fired the .38 round through the top of his foot, exploding a jet of blood from the sole of his shoe. Her expression hadn’t been one of shock or pity, as Preacher would have expected; it had been one of triumph.

No, that wasn’t it, either. What he had seen in her face was loathing and disgust. She had fried his eyes with wasp spray, taken his weapon, shot him at close quarters, crushed his cell phone with her tire, and left him to bleed out like a piece of roadkill. She had also taken the time to call him bubba and inform him he had gotten off easy. She had done all this to a man considered by some, in terms of potential, to be one notch below the scourge of God.

Rain Gods by James Lee Burke