In the Moon of Red Ponies - Hardcover

Burke, James Lee

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743245431 ISBN 13: 9780743245432

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2004

Synopsis

When Dixon, a criminal whom Billy Bob Holland had helped send to prison, is released on a technicality, Holland finds his loved ones endangered by the vengeful killer, a situation that is complicated by the government's refusal to help. By the author of Last Car to Elysian Fields. 175,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

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

Review:

James Lee Burke is the heavyweight champ, a great American novelist whose work, taken individually or as a whole, is unsurpassed. (Michael Connelly)

A gorgeous prose stylist. (Stephen King)

Richly deserves to be described now as one of the finest crime writers America has ever produced. (Daily Mail)

There are not many crime writers about whom one might invoke the name of Zola for comparison, but Burke is very much in that territory. His stamping ground is the Gulf coast, and one of the great strengths of his work has always been the atmospheric background of New Orleans and the bayous. His big, baggy novels are always about much more than the mechanics of the detective plot; his real subject, like the French master, is the human condition, seen in every situation of society. (Independent)

The king of Southern noir. (Daily Mirror)

His lyrical prose, his deep understanding of what makes people behave as they do, and his control of plot and pace are masterly. (Sunday Telegraph)

One of the finest American writers. (Guardian)

When it comes to literate, pungently characterised American crime writing, James Lee Burke has few peers. (Daily Express)

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0743245431
• ISBN 13: 9780743245432
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 322