Light of the World by James Lee Burke

Published by Simon & Schuster on July 23, 2013

As the opening paragraphs of the twentieth Dave Robicheaux novel expressly state, Light of the World is an exploration of evil, a familiar theme in James Lee Burke's books. It is Robicheaux's tale of how "one of the most wicked creatures on earth made his way into" the lives of Robicheaux's family and friends. Initially, the reader wonders whether the "wicked creature" is a born-again rodeo clown named Wyatt Dixon, the serial killer Asa Surrette (who, according to the FBI, is dead), or some other character who might be channeling Keyser Söze, making the novel a sort of whodunit. In the end, Burke's point is that evil wears many faces. Some evil people enter and leave prison, some enter the worlds of business or politics, some carry a badge. And as the best thriller writers remind us, the boundary between good and evil is often indistinct.

Robicheaux meets Dixon after an arrow sails past the ear of his adopted daughter Alafair while she's jogging in Montana during a family vacation at Albert Hollister's ranch. Alafair soon realizes that someone is stalking her, and she thinks she recognizes Surrette, a psychopath she once interviewed in a maximum security prison for a book she was writing. The stalking coincides with the murder of a seventeen-year-old girl, the adopted granddaughter of a billionaire whose son is a scoundrel.

Burke adds another dimension to the story with the reappearance of Gretchen Horowitz (last seen in Creole Belle), the daughter of Dave's friend Clete Purcel. Sexually abused as a child, Gretchen became a contract killer before renouncing her criminal vocation. Child abuse is clearly evil; whether Gretchen is evil, given her past, Burke leaves for the reader to decide. She might be less evil than a member of the local police department who brutalizes a handcuffed suspect before focusing his unwelcome attention on her. Robicheaux is a cop, but he acknowledges the evil inherent in the "sick culture" that pervades law enforcement, the "smug moral superiority" that makes police officers feel entitled to violate the laws they are sworn to enforce. Of course, any book about evil is also about good, and rare is the person who is entirely one or the other. The fact that good and evil coexist assures that they will influence (or taint) each other by virtue of their proximity. Robicheaux has learned the lesson that we all "belong to the family of man, even if only on its outer edges."

Burke writes with such eloquence that his tendency to be verbose is easy to forgive. When he waxes poetic about human nature, I take it in stride, confident that he'll eventually pick up the plot thread. His soaring prose is a joy to read. Real people generally aren't as articulate as the characters in a Burke novel (I know I'm not), but if they were, the world would be a more interesting place.

There's as much family drama as thriller drama in Light of the World, but none of it is melodrama. Family isn't always easy but it's always family, a point Burke makes through several of his characters. Burke has a knack for creating characters I'd sometimes like to strangle, while at the same time making me understand why they behave as they do.

Thrillers that take evil as their theme often allude to the devil, and this one is no exception. When Burke asks whether evil has human origins or whether it comes from a darker place, he's walking on familiar ground. When his characters started smelling peculiar odors that they associate with malevolence and seeing prints made by two-legged goat-footed creatures and at least half believing that the killer is an emissary of the devil, I became worried about the novel's direction, but Burke offers an appealing contrast of explanations for those phenomena, grounded both in the rational world and in the supernatural. In any event, Light of the World is such a deft display of suspenseful storytelling that my qualms vanished well before the novel reached its climax.

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