“Don’t Forget Me, Little Bessie” by James Lee Burke

c.2025, Atlantic Monthly Press, $28, 358 pages

Someone’s watching out for you.

Yes, you’re a grown-up but it’s nice to know, isn’t it? Someone’s got your back. You have a Guardian Angel, a protector, somebody who’ll come running if you need them. Of course, though, there’s just one little thing: as in the new novel, “Don’t Forget Me, Little Bessie” by James Lee Burke, sometimes, you have only yourself to rely on.

The first time Bessie Holland saw the spirit, she was following a plow in a field not far from her Papa’s house. Papa was inside, probably drunk, and the spirit was leaning beside a tree, cleaning his fingernails. He said his name was “Slick.” 

Bessie couldn’t see his feet, but she was sure they were cloven.

No matter. When the spirit told Papa that the people he worked for were fixin’ to take the ranch, Papa sent him running.

At just 14, Bessie knew that adults were a concerning lot. She knew the woman Papa kept company with was a madam, and that the corrupt local sheriff was trying to run her favorite teacher out of town for being a suffragette and a lesbian. And she knew that Jubal Fowler might peek at her under the outhouse door at school, and that there’d be trouble for it.

Which there was.

Afterward, she didn’t fully intend to shoot Jubal’s father, but that happened, too. 

And then there was that problem the spirit pointed out: Papa’d been avoiding the oil companies circling his ranch and with his drinking and disappearing, things didn’t look good.

Yet, she was still a teenager, and adults were a trial. Take, for instance, when wildcatters tore apart the field where a little girl was killed long ago and two men had hung for it. People started saying they saw Bessie here and there, causing mischief, and it wasn’t true.

Then again, it was her face in a photo of that hanging, wasn’t it?

So, who was the spirit and who was not?

Set at the turn of the last century in still-wild southern Texas, “Don’t Forget Me, Little Bessie” is a wonderfully lawless but still moral tale that flirts with the paranormal and brushes against the Western genre, but that’s also reminiscent of bits of several period movies you’ve seen over the years. If that sounds fun to read – it is.

Burke takes readers from dusty fields to a New York tenement and back to shake an old Holland Family tree branch. What falls are some rascals, several contemptible outlaws, and a girl who’s smarter than her years and certainly wiser than her elders. Readers, in fact, will love Bessie from the outset but you may struggle to remember that she’s just a teen. Keep your eyes open, too, for real-life historical people who are in the right places everywhere inside this book.

“Don’t Forget Me, Little Bessie” is part of a series but it can very easily stand alone. Burke fans will love it; if you’re not one yet, watch out for it.