DON'T FORGET ME, LITTLE BESSIE

The latest chapter in the saga of the Holland family focuses on a most unlikely member: Hackberry Holland’s daughter, Bessie Mae, a child born with the 20th century.

Bessie has a haint. She sees spirits and sees herself as indissolubly connected to a little girl who was murdered years ago and whose stolen life she’s determined to lead. Her tale begins in 1914 with her first encounter with Slick, a spirit who offers her a dramatically different perspective on the world from her alcoholic father, a Texas Ranger-turned-rancher, and her older brother, Cody. Although Bessie bonds with her teacher Ida Banks, this is no mere coming-of-age story. Repeatedly abused and dismissed by the threatening men who surround her—from Winthrop Fowler, the father of her schoolmate Jubal, to Indian Charlie, a killer who works security for Atlas Oil, to Tater Dog, a particularly vile member of Charlie’s gang—she’s just as proactive, outspoken, and capable from the opening as any of Burke’s gallery of male heroes. As speculators scramble to extract every drop of oil they can from beneath the Texas soil, Bessie shoots an unarmed but eminently deserving man to death and runs away to New York, where Cody’s taken up with the Bowery kids Meyer Lansky, Benny Siegel, and Owney Madden. But even the men there who won’t turn into gangsters are no better than the men Bessie left behind, and she returns to Texas determined to protect the father who can no longer protect her.

A special treat for all the readers who’ve longed to see Burke place one of his strong women at the center of a story.