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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 Kaveney
From Publishers Weekly
In this top-notch fourth novel in Burke's series featuring ex–Texas Ranger attorney Billy Bob Holland, Billy Bob has moved his family and practice to the pastoral city of Missoula, Mont., the setting of his last adventure (
Bitterroot, 2001), only to discover that the psychopathic ex-biker/rodeo clown, Wyatt Dixon (who buried Billy Bob's private investigator wife, Temple, alive), is out of prison on a technicality and claiming to be a born-again Christian. Billy Bob befriends alcoholic Desert Storm hero Johnny American Horse, a sometime breeder of horses and eco-activist who—when not in the drunk tank—is carrying on a passionate affair with Amber Finley, the daughter of Romulus Finley, a vindictive and bigoted powerful U.S. senator. When Johnny is suspected of murdering the hit man who invaded his home as well as masterminding the burglary of Global Research (a high-tech agricultural lab), making off with its computer files, the action picks up quickly. Noted for quirky characters and intricate plots, Burke introduces demon-driven sheriff's deputy Darrel McComb—an ex–war hero and former mercenary pilot who flew cocaine for the contras—who has an erotic fixation on Amber. Factor in private security agency chief Greta Lundstrum, FBI agent Seth Masterson and Karsten Mabus, CEO of the company that owns Global Research, and the mayhem builds to a gripping, spine-tingling finale.
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