There's a predictable flow to any James Lee Burke novel: one flawed but fundamentally decent man solves a few seemingly unrelated mysteries with the support of the same and/or a good woman; the bad guys get their tickets punched in increasingly violent ways; and all of the above trade cruel insults about personal character in a series of vignettes. What keeps me coming back to Burke, whether it's the Dave Robicheaux, the Billy Bob Holland, or the Hackberry Holland books, is his nature writing. Everyone knows about the lyrical environmental descriptions; the man can make a reader smell the bayou air just before a storm hits or feel the layers of sedimentary rock in desert hardpan. The study of the other kind of nature, human nature, is where he really shines. James Lee Burke can sketch a character's point of view in a few well chosen sentences, and these sentences will almost always reveal fundamental truths about the world around us. Two of my favorites from Feast Day of Fools:

(page 2)
"Hackberry Holland's greatest fear was his fellow man's propensity to act collectively, in militaristic lockstep, under the banner of God and country. Mobs did not rush across town to do good deeds, and in Hackberry's view, there was no more odious taint on any social or political endeavor than universal approval."

(page 171)
"He had known reformers and Bible-thumpers all his life, and not one of them, in his opinion, ever proved the exception when it came to obsession about sexuality: to a man, they feared their own desires and knew after waking from certain kinds of dreams what they would be capable of doing if the right situation presented itself. Every one of them was filled not with longing but with rage, and their rage always expressed itself in the same fashion: they wanted control of other people, and if they could not have control over them, they wanted them destroyed."

Fools, just like every other James Lee Burke mystery, could easily be shelved in the philosophy section of your local bookstore.