Harbor Lights - James Lee Burke

 

Harbor Lights, which includes seven short stories and one novella, is the first collection of short fiction from James Lee Burke since 2007 when the author published a ten-story collection titled Jesus Out to Sea. 

Burke's stories, no matter their length, have always focused on the very real battle between good and evil, and have featured main characters incapable of ignoring evil when confronted with it. At one point in "Strange Cargo," the novella's central character explains this impossible to deny obligation to directly confront evil when it drops into his lap by saying that he really doesn't want to do what he is about to do, but knows that if he doesn't do it he will never again find peace of mind or be able to live with himself. This is typical of a James Lee Burke hero. The author's books have always been darker than most, with the very real forces of evil, no matter what form they take, portrayed as formidable obstacles for good people to survive, much less overcome. Now, if anything, Burke manages to up the ante with Harbor Lights.

In one story, a man is just trying to get his son home safely after their car has broken down in the middle of nowhere, and he has to seek the help of  threatening strangers. In another, a college professor is drawn into the fight when his seventeen-year-old daughter comes home in a taxi after being brutally beaten outside a local bar. What both men will learn is that sometimes there is simply no one turn to for help, even those paid to do so; that if they are not willing to fight back, they and those closest to them will lose everything. 

The evil that Burke portrays in Harbor Lights often exists in the form of corrupt law enforcement officers. Some of these stories expose the utter darkness of prison life dominated by brutal guards who exploit the system and the inmates. One is about WWII federal agents who try to destroy a man after he reveals details to the press about the enemy submarine he and his son watched sink an oil tanker off the U.S. coast. The stories in Harbor Lights are a reminder that evil does not always appear where it is expected, that it is often embodied by the very people tasked with the difficult job of fighting it. 

Readers of the Holland Family series of books will recognize some of the central characters in these stories as direct descendants of Hackberry Holland often reflect on their gunfighter ancestor, a man who himself teetered on the border of good and evil during his lifetime. 

By my count (far from official), James Lee Burke has now published forty-seven books, and I have read some thirty-eight of them. For that reason, I knew what to expect from Harbor Lights. What I did not expect is how much a page-turner it is, or how much I enjoyed it. I highly recommend this one to Burke fans, and I warn the rest of you to hang on tight because Harbor Lights is a wild ride.