Bitterroot

Review by Booklist Review

Burke's Billy Bob Holland series jumped off to a terrific start four years ago with Cimarron Rose, in which the author injected new life into many of the familiar themes--especially a good man's attraction to violence--from his Dave Robicheaux novels. There was a new setting, West Texas, and a new hero who, though similar to Robicheaux, drew on a new kind of tradition (his ancestors' pioneer past). Heartwood followed in 1999, but there the similarities to the Robicheaux series dulled the emotional impact of the story. This third Billy Bob novel lands somewhere in the middle. Texas lawyer Holland is called to the Bitterroot Valley in Montana to help an old friend who is attempting to mount a one-man campaign against a mining company out to defile the ravishingly beautiful country. Holland's Texas past follows him to Montana, too, in the form of a sociopath with a grudge against the lawyer who sent his sister to prison. Longtime Burke readers will immediately spot plot similarities to two early Burke novels set in Montana: Black Cherry Blues, an award-winning Robicheaux novel, and The Lost Get-Back Boogie, in which the conflict was between small ranchers and the avaricious owners of a pulp mill. How much does this recycling get in the way? For devoted Burke readers, it's the difference between improvisation and repetition. Rather than being surprised when a familiar theme recurs in an improvised form--something Burke has done so well for years--we are dulled by the repetition of the same notes played in the same way one too many times. And yet, there is some marvelous writing here. Burke's patented lyricism has never been more beautiful--or seemed more fresh--than in his descriptions of the Montana landscape, and he does a wonderful job of contrasting that harmonious and peaceful setting with the jarring dissonance of failed human relations. This series is only an improvised lick or two away from returning to top form. --Bill Ott

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

A two-time Edgar Award winner, Burke touches on a variety of hot-button issues sure to thrill his fans in his first book since last year's Purple Cane Road. The author's popular protagonist, Texas attorney Billy Bob Holland, travels to big sky country for some fishing with Doc Voss, a friend who's relocated to Montana's Bitterroot Valley after his wife's death. Soaring descriptions of the majestic setting contrast sharply with the evil doings of the people who live there. Doc has made some powerful enemies in his campaign against a mining venture he believes would harm the economy and the pristine countryside. The stakes rise when his teenage daughter is raped in her bedroom. The rapists could be any of the white supremacists who live in the woods, randy bikers on the prowl, strange members of a conservative religious cult or even the Native Americans eking out a substandard living on the local reservation. Billy Bob and Doc also have to contend with celebrities wanting to experience "country life," organized crime figures, government agents and a sinister, recently paroled felon who blames Billy Bob for his wife's death. To top it off, Billy Bob suffers from guilt over the accidental killing of his best friend as well as nightmarish memories of Vietnam. It's only a matter of time before the powder keg blows. Those who relish Burke's patented mix of supercharged violence and overheated passions are in for a treat. (June 18) Forecast: While not quite in the same league as Purple Cane Road, this entry is likely to scale bestseller lists as well. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Violence touches all of the characters in Burke's third novel (after Cimarron Rose and Heartwood) featuring defense attorney and former Texas Ranger Billy Bob Holland. Like Dave Robicheaux, the hero of Burke's Louisiana novels, Holland is a man who spends a good deal of his time in the paths of violent people and violent events. This time he travels to Montana's Bitterroot Valley to help an old friend, Doc Voss, who is having trouble with mining companies and a local right-wing militia group. Holland must also contend with a psychotic ex-convict rodeo clown who blames him for past tragedies. Also making a few cameos is the ghost of Holland's dead partner, L.Q. Navarro, who doesn't so much haunt Holland this time as hang around to give comfort and cryptic advice. Burke has a wonderful sense of place; his settings always seep into and flavor the story. His characters are also vivid, angry, and touched hard by the world's cruelty, although sometimes it seems that the difference between the bad guys and the good guys is that the bad guys enjoy the mayhem and carnage they cause just a little more. Recommended for all public libraries. Patrick Wall, University Cty. P.L., MO (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Billy Bob Holland (Heartwood, 1999, etc.) leaves his Texas law practice behind for a fishing trip with his old friend Dr. Tobin Voss in Montana—forgetting that Burke’s troubled heroes can’t travel far enough to leave trouble behind. Case in point: When Doc Voss, a Vietnam vet who’s long opposed every cause from cyanide-assisted mining to the local militias, gets himself in with one bad apple too many, his daughter Maisey is raped and beaten. And when Lamar Ellison, the hell-raising biker who’s the obvious candidate for head rapist, is killed, Doc is promptly arrested for murder. Nor has Billy Bob been wasting his own time. In short order, he’s bedded and broken up with Dr. Cleo Lonnigan, a part-time staffer at Doc’s clinic whose husband and son were executed right around the time mobster Nicki Molinari claims she ran off with $700,000 of his money; and he’s inadvertently fingered undercover ATF agent Sue Lynn Big Medicine to Wyatt Dixon, an ex-con who’s high-tailed it up from Texas to join his old bud, militia chief Carl Dixon, and incidentally start needling Billy Bob about the fatal plea bargain he cut for Wyatt’s late sister. Refusing as usual to back down from trouble, injustice, or even a single provoking word, Billy Bob has soon antagonized Cleo, the local sheriff, and the ATF, in addition to the nominal bad guys. And Burke, who’s been exploring the unholy intimacy between good and evil for 20 years, soon has his decent hero—still haunted by the familiar of the best friend he accidentally shot to death—up to his neck in trouble, as acts of violence float and spin and vanish like leaves on a whirlpool. There can’t be much suspense when everybody in Missoula County wants to kill everybody else. Instead, Burke provides another chapter of the kind of scorched-earth moral warfare that never ends.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter One Doc's deceased wife had come from a ranching family in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana. When Doc first met her on a fishing vacation nearly twenty years ago, I think he fell in love with her state almost as much as he did with her. After her death and burial on her family's ranch, he returned to Montana again and again, spending the entire summer and holiday season there, floating the Bitterroot River or cross-country skiing and climbing in the Bitterroot Mountains with pitons and ice ax. I suspected in Doc's mind his wife was still with him when he glided down the old sunlit ski trails that crisscrossed the timber above her burial place. Finally he bought a log house on the Blackfoot River. He said it was only a vacation home, but I believed Doc was slipping away from us. Perhaps true peace might eventually come into his life, I told myself. Then, just last June, he invited me for an indefinite visit. I turned my law office over to a partner for three months and headed north with creel and fly rod in the foolish hope that somehow my own ghosts did not cross state lines. Supposedly the word "Missoula" is from the Salish Indian language and means "the meeting of the rivers." The area is so named because it is there that both the Bitterroot and Blackfoot rivers flow into the Clark Fork of the Columbia. The wooded hills above the Blackfoot River where Doc had bought his home were still dark at 7 A.M., the moon like a sliver of crusted ice above a steep-sided rock canyon that rose to a plateau covered with ponderosa. The river seemed to glow with a black, metallic light, and steam boiled out of the falls in the channels and off the boulders that were exposed in the current. I picked up my fly rod and net and canvas creel from the porch of Doc's house and walked down the path toward the riverbank. The air smelled of the water's coldness and the humus back in the darkness of the woods and the deer and elk dung that had dried on the pebbled banks of the river. I watched Doc Voss squat on his haunches in front of a driftwood fire and stir the strips of ham in a skillet with a fork, squinting his eyes against the smoke, his upper body warmed only by a fly vest, his shoulders braided with sinew. Copyright © 2001 by James Lee Burke Excerpted from Bitterroot by James Lee Burke All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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