After the success of Beat the Reaper, Dad took it upon himself to send me another one his favorites from this year, Rain Gods by James Lee Burke. For those of you who are practicing your Monte impressions, it went a little something like this: "You're gonna read it and say 'Dad's two for two!'"Well, not quite. Rain Gods was good, but nowhere near as good as Beat the Reaper. Rain Gods is the story of Hack Holland, a Texas sheriff, investigating a heinous crime, and the vast cast of characters who played a role in the events surrounding the crime. There's drugs, and guns, and Jewish matron who might be a queen, and above all, there's thick, rich Texas landscape. I could SEE this book played out as a movie. In fact, sometimes I felt like I was reading a screenplay (although without all those pesky acronyms and action lines) - the language was lush and descriptive, and the words "spoken" by the characters felt like lines of dialogue. Rain Gods totally needs to be optioned into a movie... although Tommy Lee Jones has already played one of JLB's other characters, Dave Robicheaux. And if you can't get TLJ to play a creaky alcoholic small-town Texas sheriff, who CAN you get?
In the interest of time, I slammed through the last 40-ish pages of this last night, and didn't really absorb everything that happened. Bad guys died, good guys got absolved, but the final showdown was a little contrived for my tastes. And the epilogue was LAME. But come to think of it, aren't all epiloguies lame? I call it the 19 Years Later Syndrome. I'm a sap, but I don't need everything to be wrapped up in a pretty package at the end. Leave some loose ends for the curious of the readership!
Rain Gods - B+
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