Feast Day of Fools

Starred review from August 1, 2011
In Edgar-winner Burke's outstanding third novel featuring smalltown Texas sheriff Hackberry Holland (after Rain Gods), Hackberry joins a motley crew of killers, idealists, psychos, mobsters, and Feds in the search for Noie Barnum, a disgruntled former intelligence asset who escaped the human smugglers that were trying to sell him to al-Qaeda. Barnum finds an unexpected protector in Preacher Jack Collins, a quixotic mass murderer, whom Hackberry calls "he most dangerous man I've ever met." The richness of Burke's characters, always one of his strengths, reaches new heights, as shown particularly in Krill, a mentally scarred veteran of Central American violence driven by grief over his slaughtered children, and Cody Daniels, would-be minister and xenophobe, who undergoes a spiritual sea change during his own via crucis. The intricately plotted narrative takes numerous unexpected turns, and Burke handles his trademark themes of social justice and corruption with his usual subtlety.

Will Patton is a superb listen. He combines passion, power, and pathos with exquisite voicing to bring this latest Burke mystery to even higher levels than listeners might be used to from these two accomplished storytellers. The complicated story weaves its way all over the Southwest and into northern Mexico with all the appropriate accents and dialects intact. There's no need to be concerned about getting lost with Will Patton's dependable voicing. However, he might have reviewed the pronunciations of the significant Korean landmarks that come up frequently in the story's flashbacks. Patton will wind the listener up again and again as the plot twists and turns through an allegorical landscape rooted in the evil that men do and the good that opposes them. M.C. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine