Feast Day Of Fools

In my opinion, nothing beats a great, well-written book with believable, all-too-human characters, an intricate plot, and the clash of good versus evil culminating in an exciting ending. Feast Day of Fools, written by James Lee Burke, provides all these thrills, exceptionally well-fleshed out characters, and with plenty of villains and good guys that clash, sometimes in gruesome ways, throughout the book.

The story pivots around Hackberry Holland, the sheriff of a southwest Texas county. I first met Sheriff Holland in Rain Gods, also written by James Lee Burke, and was totally impressed with this character. It amused me no end to discover that this tough sheriff, as unrelenting as the Texas county he patrols, was the ripe old age of 70. I appreciate the fact that not all heroes are virile youngsters, but rather older people with years of experience that have shaped who they are and what they stand for. As Holland muses at the beginning of the book, he had “come to believe that age was a separate country you did not try to explain to younger people, primarily because they had already made up their minds about it and any lessons you had learned from your life were not the kind many people were interested in hearing about.”

Burke writes this novel through the eyes of various characters, some of them good people, some of them very evil, and some whom we start out disliking but end up seeing some redeeming value in. As the story progresses, peripheral characters die off, often in chilling ways, while the main protagonists move slowly and inexorably towards the final showdown, an action packed few chapters that won’t let you put down the book until you know the final outcome.

All the while, these people remain real. We see character flaws in the good guys, we see a little glimmer of humanity in a few of the bad guys, we see Texas and the border problems with Mexico through opposing viewpoints, we learn a little bit about drug dealing, we see politics at work, how the unrelenting demand for energy shapes our world, and what can happen when religious zealots set out to save us from ourselves.

I highly recommend Feast Day of Fools for all those who enjoy a good cops and robbers story with believable characters and plenty of action. However, if you do not like graphic violence, this book may not be for you, as some of the scenes are not for the faint of heart. You WILL enjoy Sheriff Holland, you will root for his deputy, your heart will break at the deaths of some of the minor characters while you will smile in satisfaction when others bite the dust, and you will learn a lot about contemporary issues while you enjoy an action-packed book full of non-stop thrills and excitement.