How can a writer as great as James Lee Burke write a novel as bad as House of the Rising Sun? I just didn't buy it. A giant of an ex-Texas Ranger batters, bashes, maims and murders a whole host of Mexican soldiers, white racists, white arms dealers, white thugs, and other objectionable white people, all the while battling guilt and raging alcoholism, searching for his son, protecting the Holy Grail, and engaging in witty, occasionally amorous, mostly sonorous, eventually tedious banter with three highly intelligent, dangerous, enterprising, and beautiful females who find him mysteriously compelling. Seriously? Burke's writing is so good that it's easy to think he's actually saying something in these pages. He isn't. And I conclude this even though the book contains one of the very best paragraphs I've ever read. I'd give it three stars but for a sequence late in the novel in which our protagonist seems to wander into a Laurel and Hardy movie, with an extended, apparently-intended-to-be-humorous bit involving a fancy car and a corn field that I thought was completely out of place and out of character. Someone tell me what I'm missing here!