Don't Forget Me, Little Bessie by James Lee Burke

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on June 3, 2025

James Lee Burke earned a laminated spot on my list of top three crime fiction authors with his Robicheaux novels. He blends elements of westerns and crime thrillers in his Holland family novels. I’ve enjoyed every Burke novel I’ve read, although Don’t Forget Me, Little Bessie — a Holland family novel that focuses on Bessie Holland when she was in her early teens — is a notch below my favorites.

Bessie lives in Texas with her father, Hackberry Holland. Most of the story takes place in 1916, when Bessie is fifteen. Hackberry is a former Texas Ranger. Bessie tells us that “Mama used to say he was the best and bravest man on the Rio Grande, if only he didn’t drink.” When he isn’t drinking, gambling, or working his ranch, Hackberry is in Mexico chasing Pancho Villa, who has been leading his revolutionary army in attacks across the US border, much to the delight of Germany.

Soon after the story opens, Jubal Fowler peeps at Bessie Holland “through the slats of the schoolyard outhouse.” When Bessie’s brother Cody confronts him, Jubal uses a slingshot to shoot a marble into Cody’s eye. Cody will eventually leave to find a life in New York. Middle chapters of the novel follow Bessie to New York, where she has adventures in the city’s slums before returning to her father in Texas.

When Hackberry  confronts Winthrop Fowler, Jubal’s father, about the marble incident, Bessie reacts to a perceived threat against her father in a way that leaves Winthrop disabled. Only a fib told by a man named Mr. Slick saves Bessie from prison.

Hackberry has a friend named Bertha Lafleur, whose life he saved when he was a Ranger. Bertha is now a madam who manages a brothel. Bessie is a Baptist who condemns Bertha and doesn’t believe her father should associate with her. That’s probably true, not because Bertha manages prostitutes but because she is willing to assist a heroin dealer in a way that betrays her friendship with Hackberry.

Bessie is more than a bit judgmental and something of a hypocrite, given the number of times she threatens to kill characters, all the while telling them not to swear in her presence. She’s also intolerably bossy, which I suppose captures the spirit of fifteen-year-old girls throughout history.

Bessie has few friends. One is Mr. Slick, although Bessie believes him to be a spirit, notwithstanding his eagerness to join her for meals whenever she invites him. Thriller authors can’t seem to resist the opportunity to introduce the supernatural into their fiction. Mr. Slick seemed like a pointless character to me.

Jubal Fowler is not exactly Bessie’s friend, although she finds herself attracted to him. While the Holland and Fowler families are in something of a feud, the attraction seems to be mutual when Fowler shields Bessie from being raped. He does nothing to prevent the rape of Bessie’s friend and English teacher, Ida Banks, in Bessie’s presence.

The supernatural also intrudes in the form of a little girl who was raped and killed but makes herself visible to Bessie when her grave is disturbed by oil drilling. Bessie seems to be living the little girl’s life, although we know from the start that Bessie is narrating this story many years after it occurred and thus is not killed like the little girl. Bessie will nevertheless experience another incident of sexual violence before the story ends. The novel’s rape scenes are not graphic but sensitive readers might find them disturbing.

During Hackberry’s absence, Bessie makes a deal with an oil company to allow drilling on the Holland ranch in an effort to save the family home from her father’s gambling debts. Bessie’s alliance with an oil company employee gives her another man to set her raging hormones afire, although her Baptist morals (and perhaps her own victimization) cool her desire. The oil man is too honorable to be working in the oil industry, which naturally does it best to cheat the Hollands as it goes about its business of decimating the Texas landscape. “There was a stench in the air like rotten eggs, a monotonous clanking of oil derricks, and a sky dark with soot, the fields lit with thousands of tiny tin flames that resembled rose petals.”

As is always true of a Burke novel, the story moves quickly. Uneventful scenes are punctuated with moments that generate tension. As is always true of a Holland novel, the story is filled with historical insights. I wasn’t as taken with the plot, or with Bessie as a protagonist, as I have been with the stories and characters in other Holland novels, but Burke is one of the best prose stylists in American crime fiction. I enjoyed the novel more for the pleasure of Burke’s language than for the story he tells, despite its regular moments of excitement and dread.

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Lay Your Armor Down by Michael Farris Smith

Published by Little, Brown and Company on May 27, 2025

Lay Your Armor Down is a spooky story about three people who have survived hard lives and a little girl whose survival skills are even stronger. The story is as much about lives gone wrong as it is about a crime gone wrong.

The novel begins with an elderly woman lost to dementia who fills a shopping bag with cash she has been hiding and wanders into the woods, apparently guided by an inner sight. The woman’s name is Wanetah. The only person who ever checks on Wanetah is a woman named Cara. While Cara was the victim of abuse in an incident that taught her the risk of trusting people we don’t know well, she has not allowed her history to darken her heart.

Burdean and Keal make a living doing dirty deeds for anyone who will pay. They usually deliver duffels filled with contraband or rough up someone who owes a debt, but Burdean has been hired to retrieve something from the basement of a church. Burdean enlists Keal’s help. Burdean doesn’t know what they will find but he was told he’ll know it when he sees it.

The men delay the job when they notice a light in the church. They wait in the nearby woods to consider their options when Wanetah stumbles upon them. They relieve Wanetah of her cash before returning to their motel room.

Keal feels guilty about leaving Wanetah alone in the woods. He pictures her as prey for a wolf he saw. Keal returns without Burdean’s knowledge and, not knowing where to look for her, decides to check out the church again.

Outside the church, Keal finds a car riddled with bullet holes. He sees dead bodies inside and outside of the car. Venturing into the basement, he finds more dead bodies as well as Wanetah and a little girl. Keal finds Wanetah’s address on an envelope in her bag and takes her home, leaving her with his share of the cash he stole from her, before returning to the motel with the little girl.

The plot concerns the efforts of Keal, Burdean, and Cara to decide what to do about the little girl. She’ll only speak to Cara and doesn’t know why the bad guys want her, although Cara comes to understand that the bad guys (who may have watched too many X-Men movies) believe she has a superpower (or perhaps a supernatural power). Whether that’s true remains ambiguous throughout the novel. As is often true, evidence to support an unlikely theory may simply be a matter of coincidence.

Conflict arises between Burdean and Keal about whether they should sell the girl to the man who hired them. Burdean isn’t much of a thinker and few of his thoughts are dedicated to making moral choices. Burdean believes he is good at only three things — drinking, fighting, and fucking — and has little interest in expanding his horizons.

Keal, on the other hand, has spent his life being haunted by nightmares. He spent much of his life avoiding sleep, but the nightmares returned — dreams of storms and lightning — after meeting Cara and the girl. Whether his bad dreams are coming true is again ambiguous.

Cara is something like Keal in that, like Wanetah, she senses a reality that most people cannot perceive. Cara is also given to speeches that sound more like the product a literary crime fiction writer than the sort of prose a real person raised in unfortunate circumstances would employ — although, to be fair, eloquence is sometimes heard in unlikely voices.

Keal’s defining moment comes when he chooses his future, a choice that forces him to confront his role in the lives of Cara and the girl. “He closed his eyes and he could see the three of them hundreds of miles away in a stopsign town where little moved and little was questioned and he could sense a time when he would end up loving one or both of them and that was the last fucking thing he wanted.”

The story’s violent moments contribute to the story’s unyielding tension as the plot advances. The quasi-supernatural elements didn’t work for me and too many questions (primarily about the dead bad guys and what the surviving bad guy intends to do with the child) are left unanswered, but the quality of Michael Farris Smith’s prose and his strong characterizations counterbalance an unconvincing plot. The ending is satisfying even if it fails to offer complete closure.

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The Doorman by Chris Pavone

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD on May 20, 2025

The Doorman is a crime novel in the sense that Colson Whitehead’s recent novels have been crime novels; that is, they use crime to give the story a structure while the real story is about New York City and the division between working class and the wealthy, the clusters of racial groups and ethnicities competing for a slice of the pie. The novels differ in that race and its place in New York City’s history is the dominant theme of Whitehead’s work, while Chris Pavone uses it to provide atmosphere to a crime story.

Most of the story takes place at the Bohemian, an exclusive cooperative building where even a two-bedroom unit on a lower floor sells for millions. Key characters either live or work in the building. Julian Sonnenberg is an art dealer who earned modest wealth during the Obama years by opening a gallery with a Black partner that specialized in artists who were not straight white males. Tides eventually shifted, as tides must, and Julian is having money trouble. He’s undergoing an IRS audit, sold a Rothko of questionable origin to one of the Bohemian’s wealthiest residents, and is feeling his mortality as he prepares for surgery to correct a heart condition.

Chicky Diaz is a doorman at the Bohemian. He also has money problems, mostly medical debt related to unsuccessful treatment to save his wife from cancer. Unrelated to his work, Chicky gets into an altercation with a serious thug who now has leverage over Chicky. That leverage may induce Chicky to facilitate a crime.

Emily Longworth lives in a double-sized unit on the eleventh floor. Most of the school moms in Emily’s social group work for charities or have “careers” as feng shui consultants or interior designers. Emily uses her middle name (Grace) to hide from her friends when she volunteers at a soup kitchen but spends $4 million a year managing her household. Emily is married to Whitaker, whose wealth derives from selling body armor to militaries and terrorists alike. Emily is having an affair and would like a divorce but is stuck with a prenup that would leave her a bit less than a million dollars a year, an amount insufficient to keep her in the world of high society.

Whit has a habit of putting a hand around Emily’s neck during sex. He also pays prostitutes to disguise themselves as Emily so he can choke them more forcefully. In the view of the doorman, who encounters one of Whit’s abused prostitute during his part-time job at a hotel, Whit is rehearsing his wife’s murder. Apart from the unsavory way in which Whit built his wealth, decent readers will dislike Whit for his unrepentant racism and sexism. Emily is rather fed up with one of Whit’s business associates, a disgusting guy who is even more brazenly racist than Whit.

In the background are two police shootings of young Black men. Protestors are swarming the city. They’re also protesting outside Whitaker’s company after news “leaks” about its sales of body armor to countries that support terrorism. The identity of the leaker will probably come as a surprise to most readers.

More than three-quarters of the novel sets the stage for the crime that occurs near the novel’s end. The reader might guess what that crime will be, but the guess will likely be wrong, thanks to Pavone’s skillful misdirection. In a series of frenzied but controlled scenes, the way the crime unfolds comes as a genuine surprise (at least it did to me). That makes The Doorman one of the smartest crime novels I’ve read this year.

Underlying themes of race and class keep the reader engaged as they wait for the criminal climax. Various points of view are represented along the right-left spectrum. The wealth of the Bohemian’s residents contrasts with the working class people who serve them, both in the building and elsewhere in New York City. Chicky frequently comments upon ethnic changes in the city. His first superintendent was Irish, as were all the supers Chicky knew when he started working. The superintendent hired Chicky but didn’t want him to look “ethnic,” prompting Chicky to comment to himself “as if Irish wasn’t an ethnicity.” The super’s successors were Eastern Europeans. “But they were also one white guy after another. Different types of white guys but still.” The building’s residents are almost entirely white and its governing board (on which Julian sits) intends to keep it that way, notwithstanding Julian’s warnings about legal liability.

The building’s staff are now Hispanic (Chicky doesn’t have much use for the term Latinx) thanks to Chicky, who alerted friends to job openings. Chicky notes that other buildings fill their staff with other ethnicities in the same way, word of mouth steering neighborhoods of manual workers into available jobs.

The mix of NYC’s people and criminals (from white collar to violent) add flavor to the novel and give the reader something to chew on while waiting for the crime to occur. It’s a long wait but the story is so entertaining that I wouldn’t expect most readers to grow impatient. And when the crime finally arrives, the story becomes tense as characters the reader will probably like are placed at risk. Some are unexpectedly heroic, others are true to character, and one will behave in a way that few readers will expect. The shock value of the final pages, combined with the engaging look at urban life that precedes them, makes The Doorman an essential read for fans of crime novels who are looking for a break from stories of tough guys enforcing morality with their fists.

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The Palace of Saints and Sinners by Ammar Merchant

Published by Simon & Schuster on May 20, 2025

Tough guy thrillers are too often clones of Reacher novels. Some recent Reacher novels have been clones of earlier Reacher novels. Fortunately, a few tough guy novelists have managed to bring something fresh to the genre. Newcomer Ammar Merchant managed that feat with The Palace of Saints and Sinners.

While the novel’s plot is familiar, Irfan Mirza differs from other thriller tough guys. He’s the first fictional Muslim tough guy I can recall encountering. Beyond that, he isn’t an American or a Western European. He spent his early childhood “as an urchin in Karachi, begging, stealing, fighting, and hustling to survive.” Then he was taken to Turkey, where a general trained children for his private army. The concept of children raised to be fighters has been done before, but the setting makes it seem new.

Mirza is now a mercenary who solves problems with brute force because he’s not a heavy thinker. His approach to a problem is to charge at it and smash it with his shoulder. He manages to knock down a wall using that tactic. I appreciate Amar Merchant’s decision to make Mirza a tough guy who makes no pretense of being anything else. Mirza’s simplicity is appealing.

Mirza sometimes teams with a talented thief named Omen Ferris. Omen would like to sleep with Mirza and he shares that desire, but Mirza’s divorce has not been finalized and he has a thing about keeping his oaths.

Mirza is still in touch with some of the other weaponized orphans, thanks to the efforts of Finn Thompson, who treats them as siblings and tries to keep track of them. One of the orphans, Renata Bardales, is the closest thing to a sister that Mirza has. Ren is engaged to a prince from Aldatan whose father is a cousin of the country’s king.

Mirza begins the novel by taking revenge on terrorists in Malaysia who killed a travel vlogger, having been hired for that task by the vlogger’s father. After establishing Mirza’s tough guy bona fides, Merchant sends Mirza on the kind of fast-action plot that makes a well-crafted tough guy novel enjoyable.

Ren’s fiancé and his father have made an enemy of the king by criticizing his undemocratic tendencies. The king pretends he has reformed Aldatan to encourage investment from western nations, but he permits no dissent while allowing powerless citizens of the country to exercise little personal freedom. Merchant situated the fictional country of Aldatan to the north of Yemen.

The prince, his father, and Ren are being held in a secret prison to which the king makes his enemies disappear. The prison is in a castle that is managed by the head of a private security company who has been instructed to extract confessions that can be used to discredit the prince and his father.

When Finn tells Mirza of Ren’s predicament, he and Omen travel to Aldatan. While the reader suspects that Mirza might try to knock down the prison castle by charging into it, they embark on a traditional thriller assault. Finn runs into some trouble that sidelines him (he needs to be hidden and tended by nuns who mend his wounds), so Mirza and Omen carry the load. Pitting a lightly armed tough guy and a thief against thirty heavily armed security guards might seem like poor odds, but modern thriller writers like to turn tough guys into unkillable superheroes who can wipe out bad guys a dozen at a time.

Merchant sprinkles human interest into the story through Mirza’s relationship with his daughter. She isn’t a character in the novel, but Mirza needs to decide whether he’s doing the right thing by calling her every time he starts a mission to let her know that it might be his last. He does that because his father promised to return after walking away while carrying a suitcase but never did. Mirza thinks it’s more honest to let his daughter know that he might not return, but as others tell him, he’s only freaking his daughter out with his calls. That plot thread leads to a touching moment when he calls his daughter for what he assumes will be the last time after sustaining one of the many wounds he absorbs during the novel.

The novel has more graphic violence than most. Women are raped but Merchant spares the reader a description of those assaults. Readers who are sensitive to torture scenes might want to give The Palace of Sinners and Saints a pass. I recommend it to other thriller fans because Merchant’s prose is energetic, Mirza is an appealing tough guy protagonist, and the fast-moving plot is so fun that the reader has little reason to consider its improbability.

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The Boy from the Sea by Garrett Carr

First published in Great Britain in 2025; published by Knopf on May 13, 2025

A great joy of reading is the opportunity to imagine ways of living that are unlike our own. The Boy from the Sea is a character-driven family drama. The family lives in Donegal during the 1980s. Males in Donegal are expected to fit into a stereotype of working-class men who are stoic and silent, who hold their thoughts and problems close, and who avoid calling attention to themselves. They obey cultural norms that, with some subtlety, govern their responses to social situations.

The men have no idea how to communicate with their wives and children and are afraid that any meaningful attempt to do so will be seen as a kind of weakness or failure. The female characters admire their men and keep a sharp eye on their children to be sure they follow the model their fathers have established. The need to "fit in" and for their children to do so is uppermost in the adult characters' minds.

Ambrose Bonnar is a fisherman, as are most of the men in Donegal. He is respected in the community because he knows his place, keeps his head down, and follows the social rules. His best friend is a fisherman named Thomas. Ambrose is married to Christine and they have a son named Declan. Christine has a sister named Phyllis; their aging and declining father is Eunan. Phyllis made a less fortunate match than Christine and comes to depend on her sister for financial assistance. That dynamic contributes to the drama.

For a time, Ambrose fishes with Thomas; they drag a net fastened to both their boats and split the catch. They make decent money by Donegal standards but times are changing. “No one yet admitted it but the North Atlantic cod fishery was collapsing and there’d soon be next to none.” They resent the ability of other Europeans to fish in their waters but resent even more the restrictions imposed by governments to curtail overfishing.

The partnership ends when Thomas buys a larger and faster boat. Ambrose would like to do the same but learns that Christine has failed to make some mortgage payments because she knows their community’s bank won’t foreclose. The bank might not foreclose but it won’t lend more money to a family with delinquent payments. Ambrose can’t compete with bigger trawlers and fears it is only a matter of time before he will need to stop fishing and join his brothers in England, where other Irish men have fled to find jobs as laborers for pay that isn’t available in Ireland. Ambrose doesn't want to become “the person you had to become to be the kind of person who goes to England,” a change in personality akin to “giving up the drink or finding God.”

The story opens with a local man’s discovery of a baby, floating into the bay in a barrel that has been cut in half and lined with tinfoil. Some Donegal residents suspect that the man actually found the baby on the beach, but his story of wading into the bay to retrieve the barrel is more colorful.

After being passed from family to family for a short time, Ambrose and Christine decide to raise the baby as their own. That decision will spark jealousy from Declan, who doesn’t want to share his father’s attention with a boy who doesn’t share the same blood. Ambrose and Christine name the boy Brendan. Brendan’s true origin becomes a source of gossipy drama near the story’s end.

The boy from the sea becomes a local legend. As he grows, he gives simple blessings to town residents, saying things like “Hopefully things will work out for you.” Not much of a blessing, perhaps, but one that is appreciated by people who value restraint, who mistrust promises and overstatements.

The story offers a few eventful moments (too few to spoil by discussing them here), but The Boy from the Sea is probably not a good choice for readers who are only interested in plot-driven fiction. The novel’s value lies in its depiction of Donegal and its residents. The story is narrated in the third person by an observer using the term “we,” but context suggests that the narrative voice is that of Donegal. It is the collective voice of lifelong inhabitants who share the same perspective on how life should be lived. The community is open to forgiveness of those who stray from its core values, but only when the time seems right. “Life was a sort of procession and we all marched in it together, you had to keep up.”

More precisely, the story seems to be narrated by the men of Donegal. “Donegal men had strikingly big key fobs, we tended to have many padlocks in our lives.” When Ambrose decides that Declan is grown and doesn’t need him anymore, the narrative chorus deems this “a grim way to think and we would’ve told him that had we been the types to meddle.” The men distinguish themselves from the “alternative lifestylers” with shaggy hair and sandals who come from Europe to enjoy the sea. To the men of Donegal, the sea is their life, something to be respected. They have little tolerance for leisure or for those who have time to enjoy their lives.

Garrett Carr paints a sharply focused picture of Donegal residents as people who know their place in the social order, who are intent on not troubling others. When Eunan had a stroke, he was aware of what was happening “but said nothing as he hadn’t wanted to make a show of himself.” If they complain at all, they turn their complaints to the weather or other topics that will not spark controversy. They know their lot in life is to bear whatever misfortune comes their way and they are proud of their ability to do so without complaint.

The women are similar but, in private, are more likely to give voice to feelings of resentment. When Phyllis and Christine watch a documentary about the likely aftermath of nuclear war, they agree that Donegal is too unimportant to be bombed. “Yes, it’ll be nuclear winter for us,” said Phyllis bitterly, “we’ll be expected to put up with it.”

In a beautiful scene, Ambrose and Christine reconnect after Ambrose is nearly lost at sea in the novel’s most harrowing moment. As they explore each other’s bodies, they remind each other about the source of their scars: fishhooks and rope burns for Ambrose, kitchen knives and rescuing Brendan from a barbed wire fence for Christine. Carr collapses lifetimes into those scars. The concept of two lovers reminding themselves of all they have done by revisiting their scars is striking.

Carr’s prose is fluid and strong; his characterizations are insightful. Declan would like to be a chef but he comes to accept that being a fisherman is his destiny. Brendan, having his roots in the sea rather than Donegal, is the character most likely to chase a dream, but it isn’t clear until the novel’s end that Brendan has one.

The ending doesn’t definitively resolve the mystery of Brendan’s origin but it offers a likely answer. It also suggests that fates to which we have reconciled ourselves might be changed if we have the courage not to be governed by expectations. These are powerful themes. As a debut novel, The Boy from the Sea establishes Carr as a writer who merits an audience.

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