House of the Rising Sun
Part of a series by veteran and best-selling author James Lee Burke, this novel presents the seemingly incessant travails of its protagonist, erstwhile Texas Ranger and deputy sheriff, Hackberry Holland. On a mission to find his long-lost son, Ishmael, Hack finds himself in revolutionary Mexico, where he promptly dispatches four marauding Mexican soldiers, meets an alluring and exotic woman named Beatrice DeMolay, and absconds with an ancient artifact desperately desired by a virulently evil Austrian arms merchant.
A series of time-shifting vignettes recalls Holland’s first meeting with Ishmael’s mother, Ruby, the son’s bloody and heart-wrenching experience at the battle of the Marne in 1918, and Hack’s tribulations with his legal but problematic wife, Maggie. All three of the women play various roles in Holland’s quest to find and rescue his battle-wounded son from the clutches of the powerful Austrian who seems to own much of the Texan legal and political establishment and all of the local desperadoes. The book tensely careens to an inevitable violent climax.
The novel is populated by plenty of mean and nasty people; very few of them are likeable, including Hack and the three flawed women around him. Ishmael stands out as the one innocent and noble character, and his parents’ unshakeable love for him provides some form of redemption for them both. A fascinating sub-theme is the inescapable transformation of the “Wild West” into the “modern era” of the early 1900s and the clashes associated with that evolution. One good example is a Colt Peacemaker revolver that is employed against a Lewis machine gun. Despite some seemingly inane vulgarity and nihilism, the plain-spoken, often unsettling dialogue sparkles with wit and captures the reader’s interest.
