Product Description Winner of the 2012 Audie Award for MysteryThe critically acclaimed thirtieth entry from New York Times bestselling author James Lee Burke, featuring Texas Sheriff Hackberry Holland in an epic tale that is equal parts thriller, Western, and literary masterpiece.James Lee Burke returns to the Texas border town of his bestseller Rain Gods, where a serial killer presumed dead is very much alive…and where sheriff Hackberry Holland, now a widower, fights for survival—his own, and of the citizens he’s sworn to protect. When alcoholic ex-boxer Danny Boy Lorca witnesses a man tortured to death in the desert, Hackberry’s investigation leads him to Anton Ling, a mysterious Chinese woman known for sheltering illegals. Ling denies any knowledge of the attack, but something in her aristocratic beauty seduces Hack into overlooking that she is as dangerous as the men she harbors. And when soulless Preacher Jack Collins reemerges, the cold-blooded killer may prove invaluable to Hackberry. This time, he and the Preacher have a common enemy. Review "He's a genius, Burke, and I read everything he puts out. All his novels are about good vs. evil and how hard it is to overcome evil. This one's about a Texas sheriff and two villains, one associated with the [drug] cartels, the other a mass murderer. The three of them collide.""--"Bill O'Reilly for the" New York Post""""At 75, Burke is writing each book as if it could be his final one. . . . ["Feast Day of Fools"] is soaked with a sense of mortality. . . . It's easy to hear echoes of Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy, but Burke is his own writer. He carries off a rich underlayer of Christian imagery without falling into predictable symbolism. Burke is a master of meaty dialogue, darkly funny passages in which characters reveal themselves while talking at cross-purposes. And this woebegone place, beset by thunderstorms that don't penetrate the hard soil, is just as vivid, though very different, from the swampy Louisiana of his Robicheaux novels. . . . Burke uses the simple framework of a series mystery to explore a world at the border of the realistic and the mythic."--"The Columbus Dispatch""James Lee Burke presses onward with his singular mission to rewrite the American western in "Feast Day of Fools" . . . Burke is constructing a whole mew mythology in this series, with characters haunted by history and driven by ghosts. . . . Hackberry Holland's assertion that 'a martial and savage spirit had ruled these hills' since the time of the conquistadors is a good man's way of saying that the violence we do sinks into the ground we walk on and becomes part of our collective heritage."--"The New York Times Book Review""Riveting . . . Burke is creating an allegorical, almost Biblical setting here: The lost wander hopelessly in the desert, seeking revenge or redemption or some terrible mix of both. The moral center in all of this is Hackberry Holland, who feels old 'in the way people feel old when they have more knowledge of the world than they need.' He's Burke's most fascinating character, a man whose sense of justice has been shaken but not destroyed. Equally compelling is Pam Tibbs, the most no-nonsense woman in fictional law enforcement ('Men often thought she was trying to be cute. They were mistaken'). The push-and-pull between the two is just one more of Burke's thrilling examples of the mysteries of the human heart."--"The Miami Herald""Burke's evocative prose remains a thing of reliably fierce wonder."--"Entertainment Weekly""James Lee Burke's thirty superbly written mysteries and Westerns have always been allegorical, illuminating the grandest of themes. Over the years, he has written about racism, neocolonialism, the rape of the environment, the hijacking of Christianity by hateful bigots and the futility of war. He has written about manipulative political and business figures, and about the quest for individual and national redemption. He has also explored the natu