‘Moon of Red Ponies’ a splendidly written crime novel

James Lee Burke has again written a splendid crime novel crawling with murderous lowlifes.

There’s the bungling murder-for-hire team of Edward T. Bumper and Charlie Ruggles. There’s Darrel McComb, a thuggish, racist cop. There’s Jeff Barker, a child molester who did some hits for the Mexican Mafia during his stretch in Soledad. And then there’s his buddy, Lynwood Peeples, a horse doper and suspected wife killer.

For the lyrically titled “In the Moon of Red Ponies,” Burke has even reprised one of his most memorable bad guys — psychopathic rodeo clown Wyatt Dixon.

But in Burke’s novels, the bad guys you meet up-close are expendable pawns of the real villains, shadowy forces who “can’t be gotten rid of by a bullet.”

Sometimes, it’s chemical and oil companies who ruin the land — and the politicians who let them get away with it. Sometimes, it’s a culture poisoned by a legacy of racism. This time, it’s an alliance of power-drunk federal officials and greed-driven tycoons operating under a cloak of patriotism.

Burke’s paranoid vision — and the artistry with which he portrays it — makes “Red Ponies” a deeply disturbing book in an era of Tyco, Halliburton, Total Information Awareness, black ops and the Patriot Act. His lowlifes will scare the devil out of you; the shadowy forces that unleash them will scare you even more.

If you find the courage to stand up to this evil, “you are on your own,” one character says. Another adds: “You want justice, you got to get it yourself.” The cops, you see, are either corrupted or outnumbered and outgunned.

Into this quagmire, Burke brings back Billy Bob Holland, who first showed up as a noble but violent Texas Ranger in “Cimarron Rose.”

“Red Ponies” finds Billy Bob retired from the Rangers and working as a defense lawyer in Missoula (Burke lives part-time in Montana) amid a magnificent landscape peopled by impoverished Indians, college students, Christian Identity nuts, ranchers and the Aryan Nation.

Billy Bob is a man who loves violence and hates himself for it. His nemesis, Dixon, knows Billy Bob well. “Tell me the feel of a gun in your hand don’t excite you, just like the touch of a woman,” he taunts.

As in “Bitterroot,” the last book starring Billy Bob, the character is haunted by waking dreams of his best friend, L.Q. Navarro, who he accidentally shot down years earlier when a gunfight with Mexican drug runners went bad.

The dreams of Billy Bob, and of most of the other major characters, give the book a mystical quality rare in crime fiction.

Johnny American Horse, a descendant of Crazy Horse who battles those he considers spiritual enemies of the Earth and its people, dreams of rivers and pink mesas, of herds of bison and red ponies. McComb, the racist cop, dreams of a pink reef infested with sharks. Dixon dreams of disembodied faces and bucking rodeo bulls, and his dreams are always in black and white.

Even when the fight is upon him, threatening his home and his family, Billy Bob resists getting involved as long as he can, then acts in an explosion of ineffectual violence.

Throughout, he is more narrator than actor. The real hero of the tale is Johnny American Horse, who stays true to his dreams and presses the fight at great personal cost. But he gets a lot of help along the way from two unlikely sources — evil men who somehow end up on the right side of the struggle.

Still, in Burke’s world, this is a war the good guys can never win. Because, he writes, the enemy is “legion and timeless.”