James Lee Burke writes like Faulkner moved to Texas and started carrying a badge.
I need to say that up front because if you've never read Burke, you need to understand what you're walking into. This isn't a procedural. This isn't a whodunit where the detective follows clues to a tidy resolution. Rain Gods is a novel about violence and grace and the stubborn, sometimes foolish belief that doing right matters even when the universe keeps handing you evidence to the contrary. And Will Patton narrates it like he was born in that cracked border dirt.
The Prose Deserves to Be Savored at 1.0x
I was walking the lakefront with Denise on a Saturday morning - one of those late fall Chicago days where the wind off the lake makes you question every life choice that didn't lead to Arizona - and Burke hit me with a passage describing the Texas hill country after rain. The way the light hits caliche roads. The smell of creosote bush. And Patton delivered it with this unhurried, dust-dry cadence that made me stop walking. Denise asked if I was okay. I was better than okay. I was in southeast Texas.
Burke's prose is the thing people either love or can't stand, and I get both reactions. He'll interrupt a scene where Hackberry Holland is confronting a suspect to give you three paragraphs about mesquite trees and Korean War memories. Some listeners call this meandering. I call it the whole point. This reminds me of what Hemingway said about the iceberg theory - except Burke shows you the iceberg AND what's underneath, and trusts you to understand why both matter.
The writing does occasionally tip over into what I'd call ornamental - there are moments where the metaphors stack up like too many adjectives in a freshman essay. Burke comparing a character's eyes to "burnt match heads" in one scene and then giving you another elaborate simile two paragraphs later can feel like he's showing off. My students would hate this. I love it. Mostly.
Preacher Jack Collins Is the Villain English Teachers Dream About
Let's talk about what Burke is really saying with Preacher Jack Collins, because this character is what elevates the book from good crime fiction to something that sticks in your chest. Collins is a contract killer who quotes scripture, who genuinely believes he's doing God's work. He's not a cartoon sociopath. He's articulate, eerily calm, and - this is the unsettling part - he has his own internal logic that almost makes sense if you squint at it wrong.
Patton voices Collins with this flat, measured quality that's more terrifying than any snarling villain voice would be. There's no heat in it. When Collins speaks about killing those nine women and girls found in that shallow grave near the border, his tone carries the same weight as if he's discussing the weather. The contrast between what he's saying and how Patton delivers it is genuinely chilling. The narrator understands that pause is punctuation - and Patton uses silence after Collins's lines the way Burke uses white space on the page.
The confrontations between Hackberry Holland and Collins are the spine of this book, and they work because both men believe they're right. Hackberry is haunted - by his time as a POW in Korea, by his dead wife, by the fact that he's an old man in a young man's fight - but he keeps showing up. The scenes between him and Deputy Pam Tibbs crackle with an unspoken tenderness that Patton handles with real subtlety, never pushing the emotion past where it naturally sits.
Pete Flores and Vikki Gaddis, the young couple on the run, function as the book's moral stakes. They're damaged and desperate and not always smart about their choices, which makes them feel painfully real. Burke gives them enough rope to make you worry.
Where Burke Tests Your Patience (And Whether That's Fair)
At nearly sixteen hours, Rain Gods asks for commitment. There are stretches - particularly in the middle third - where Burke introduces secondary characters who get their own backstories, their own poetic reflections on the American Southwest, their own moral reckonings. Some of these land beautifully. Others feel like Burke wandering away from the story to write a short story inside his novel.
If you loved No Country for Old Men, this is its spiritual successor - the same border country, the same sense of inexorable violence, the same aging lawman trying to make sense of evil. But where McCarthy stripped everything to bone, Burke adds flesh and blood and sometimes a little too much fat. Both approaches work. Burke's just asks more of your time.
Patton earns every minute of it, though. His narration won the Audie for Mystery in 2012, and it's deserved. He doesn't showboat. He serves the text. Worth pausing the faculty meeting for - and I did, multiple times, rewinding to catch lines I'd half-missed while pretending to review the new attendance policy.
Who This Is For (And Who Should Walk Away)
If you need plot momentum to stay engaged, this will frustrate you. If you think crime fiction should be lean and procedural, Burke's lyrical digressions will drive you up the wall. I had a similar reckoning with Guardian — a book that also asks you to trust the atmosphere before it pays off the plot, and I'm not sure it ever fully earns that patience the way Burke does here. But if you believe - like I do - that the best crime fiction is really just literature wearing a shoulder holster, Rain Gods belongs on your list. This is why we still read the classics, even the contemporary ones that'll become classics. Burke and Patton together are something special.
Denise finished the walk twenty minutes before I did. I was still standing by the boathouse, listening.
