‘When These Mountains Burn’ tells a searing crime story

David Joy’s fourth book delves into drugs, deception and desperation.

There are no heroes in David Joy’s fantastic, often brutal, novels. It doesn’t matter if you’re a small-town cop or a big-city FBI agent, a junkie or a kingpin, at some point there’s going to be a reckoning with the order of your world. The winners are typically those left standing, regardless of how pleasant society might assign their morality.

In “When These Mountains Burn” (Putnam, 272 pp, ★★★g), Joy’s outstanding fourth book, everyone is afflicted with something that can kill them – be it heroin, cancer or merely trusting the wrong person – all staged against the backdrop of mountains ringed by wildfire and suffused by the very real sense that no one is coming to save anyone.

“Mountains” is told from the perspectives of several characters who all intersect through the life of Raymond Mathis, a widower recently retired from three decades in the Forest Service. He’s the kind of man imbued by a simple code: “With the good and the bad, Ray started his days with a pot of coffee and a book, and ended them with four fingers of good whiskey and a gas station cigar.”

It’s the bad that has defined the last several years of Ray’s life, courtesy of his son Ricky, an addict and crook, who finds himself owing the wrong people $10,000. It may as well be a million dollars to Ricky – or anyone else in this world – because cash isn’t the kind of thing anyone holds onto for very long and it surely isn’t a thing you pay your debts with.

Ray knows his son isn’t long for this life, so he pays what effectively turns into a ransom, giving his son one more shot at sobriety. It’s ill-fated, of course. And so comes the question: Who pays for killing a man society views as worthless by virtue of his disease?

Joy’s books often question the meaning of justice – street or otherwise. Here that meaning lurks, surprisingly, in the form of two disparate forces: an undercover FBI agent called Rodriguez and a Cherokee named Denny Rattler. Rodriguez sees how drugs have destroyed the rural the south, how death comes from systemic avoidance, but that someone, eventually has to act. He knows that “[i]f there was dope, there were needles. If there were needles, there was death… You could stay up at night and keep a running tally on your bedroom wall, but eventually you’d run out of room. It was best not to put faces with names, or give names to numbers. A man could get bogged down in the bodies.”

Denny, meanwhile, is a classic dupe: a straight guy warped by drugs into a shadow of his former self. Denny’s become friendly with duplicity (and the violence which often results from it) because he hates himself more than he hates anyone else. His petty crimes – he’s an adept cat burglar, who never steals anything anyone really will miss, which isn’t a great way to earn a living – and addiction eventually lead him to cross paths with Ricky Mathis and, for the rest of “When These Mountains Burn,” that path turns rutted and treacherous.

Denny’s inherent decency in a world of corruption and mendacity forces the reader into difficult emotional territory. You’d cross the street to get away from Denny Rattler… if you didn’t know him. And if you did know him? You’d feed him a Swanson chicken dinner and do his laundry.

He’s not a hero. He’ll disappoint you.