Reviews for Every cloak rolled in blood

Library Journal
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After the death of his daughter, a depressed, grief-stricken Aaron Holland Broussard is forced to adopt the serenity prayer and acknowledge he must accept the things he cannot change. His daughter, Fannie Mae, has passed, but her spirit lingers to guide him as he navigates hate, racism, misogyny, fanatical religion, and manifestations. In Montana, where the long and wide landscape promises open skies and freedom, Broussard sees dark, troublesome shadows, a revelation of what was and still is the brutality of human existence. Evil is manifested as Major Eugene Baker, who commanded the massacre of many Blackfeet people in 1870. Clarity is Ruby Spotted Horse, a Montana state trooper who holds evil at bay behind a door in her cellar. And hope is Fannie Mae, who precedes him in the afterlife and ensures him there is much he can still do, must do. Broussard encounters many of the same stylized characters as he did in Burke's three previous novels of the "Holland Family Saga" series. Narrator Will Patton brings Burke's world to life with casual but masterful confidence. VERDICT A heavy-handed but well-written addition to the series that is drawn from the author's own experience of unexpectedly losing a daughter.—Laura Brosie


Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

More or less retired to Montana, SF author Aaron Holland Broussard is faced with a series of crimes evidently committed by someone who’s been dead for more than a hundred years. Aaron, now 85, has been haunted by the specter of his daughter, Fannie Mae, ever since she succumbed to alcohol, Ambien, and unsuitable men at the relatively tender age of 54. All he wants is to be left in peace on his homestead near the Flathead Reservation. Instead, he sees resentful neighbor John Fenimore Culpepper and his son, Leigh, painting a swastika on his barn door. Soon after he reports the outrage to State Trooper Ruby Spotted Horse and Sister Ginny Stokes, pastor of the New Gospel Tabernacle, stops off to repaint his door, he gets an unwelcome visit from Clayton and Jack Wetzel, a pair of meth-head brothers looking for trouble. Clayton’s problems end when he’s found dead near the railroad tracks, and Aaron tries to assuage Jack’s by giving him some work around his place and treating him with unaccustomed decency. But Aaron himself is more and more troubled, not only because two cafe waitresses are killed in separate incidents, but because his visitations from Fannie Mae are supplemented by increasingly painful visions of Maj. Eugene Baker, who ordered a historic massacre of the Native Americans living on the land in 1870. The arrival of murderous meth dealer Jimmie Kale, a familiar Burke type, convinces Aaron that “Baker had the power to commit crimes in the present”—and that present-day America offers him unique avatars and opportunities to do so. Less mystery than history, less history than prophecy, and all the stronger for it. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.


Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Drawing poignantly on the death of his daughter Pamala (discussed in a moving introduction), Burke picks up the story of Aaron Broussard Holland decades after the events of Another Kind of Eden (2021). Now a successful novelist in his 80s, living on a farm near Missoula, Montana, Holland is grieving the sudden death of his daughter, Fannie Mae, while trying to help a young man, Jack Wetzel, who is entangled in the opioid subculture. These efforts generate conflict with the region's meth kingpin as well as with a former Klansman, but, at the same time, Holland is confronted with forces beyond the realm of the living, which is no surprise for a man who doesn't discount "the possibility that unseen entities exist just the other side of our fingertips." The ghost of Fannie Mae appears and offers counsel, but there are other, less-kindly supernatural visitors, including Major Eugene Baker, who was responsible for the massacre of more than 200 Blackfeet Indians in 1870, on land near Holland's farm. As the circle of evil closes in on Holland and Native American policewoman Ruby Spotted Horse, Burke rolls together the driving themes that have dominated his work—the inescapable presence of evil, the restorative power of love, the desecration of the planet, humanity's long slouch toward Armageddon—into an intensely, heartrendingly personal exploration of grief.


Publishers Weekly
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At the start of this stunning supernaturally tinged entry in MWA Grand Master Burke’s long-running Holland family saga (after 2021’s Another Kind of Eden), a teenage boy spray paints a swastika on the barn of octogenarian author Aaron Holland Broussard in rural Montana. Broussard’s interactions with the teen lead him into conflict with a host of villains, including evangelical bikers and a meth dealer who has been known to bury people alive. On the side of the angels is Ruby Spotted Horse, the state trooper who responds to his call about the graffiti and who, it turns out, is also entrusted with keeping the malevolent Old People from escaping their confinement beneath her house. Broussard’s other ally is his dead daughter, Fannie Mae, who appears from time to time to just converse or to bring him warnings. Setting aside the ghosts, this is one of those extraordinary crime novels that feels more like real life, with incidents and people that aren’t obviously connected piling up in the protagonist’s life, rather than a neat set of clues pointing to a culprit. Once again, Burke uses genre fiction to plumb weighty issues, both social and emotional. Agent: Anne-Lise Spitzer, Philip G. Spitzer Literary. (May)

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