Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland) - Hardcover

Burke, James Lee

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0752841548 ISBN 13: 9780752841540

Publisher: Orion, 2001

Synopsis

"John Steinbeck once said Montana is a love affair. If a person was going to make his troth with any particular place on earth, I don't think he could find a better one than this stretch of road. Every bridge crossed a postcard stream, every mountain tumbled into one higher and a deeper green than itself."

But in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana, the love affair has a chilling side, as ex-Texas Ranger, now lawyer, Billy Bob Holland discovers on a visit to his friend from Vietnam days, Doc Voss. Doc's daughter Maisey is brutally gang-raped by bikers and ring leader Lamar Ellison walks free when the DNA samples 'get lost'. Billy Bob wonders: whose side is the sheriff on?

Soon after, Ellison is burned alive and Doc is arrested. So much for Billy Bob's vacation...

Doc needs a lawyer, and fast. Not only that: newly released killer, the grotesque Wyatt Dixon has tracked Billy Bob to Montana, bent on avenging the death of his sister for which he holds Billy Bob responsible. As the corpses of the guilty and innocent pile up, Billy Bob stands alone, still haunted by his dead friend L.Q. Navarro, determined that the centre will hold, no matter what evil threatens it.

About this title

Review

Set in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, home to celebrities seeking to escape the pressures of public life, as well as to xenophobes dedicated to establishing a bulkhead of patriotic paranoia, James Lee Burke's Bitterroot features Billy Bob Holland, former Texas Ranger and now a Texas-based lawyer, who has come to Big Sky country for some fishing and ends up helping out an old friend in trouble.

Former Texas Rangers are suckers for old friends in distress, so when Vietnam vet and recent widower Doc Voss calls lawyer Billy Bob Holland from Montana with an apparently innocent invitation, Billy Bob packs up and goes in hopes that his "own ghosts [don't] cross state lines".

Doc manages to alienate everyone in town, including mining interests on the Blackfoot River; a drug-running biker gang, an enclave of white supremacists and the feds, who don't want anything interfering with their pursuit of both Hinkel and Molinari. After Doc's daughter is brutally raped by three of the bikers (who are then brutally murdered), Holland must try to clear his friend of suspicion. As he ferrets through a tangled web of coincidence and connection, he risks losing everything and everyone dear to him.

James Lee Burke's prose alternately sparkles with a perverse insouciance and glows with a muted intensity, and the author's capacity to add depth to his characters with a few well-chosen phrases is striking.

Is the Billy Bob Holland series (three novels and counting) just Robicheaux Redux? The ex-Texas Ranger is, as either man might admit, the spitting image of Dave Robicheaux, Burke's Louisiana PI: simultaneously rugged and rage-filled, chivalrous and callow, debonair and disturbing. And like the Robicheaux series, the Holland novels drift effortlessly among genres: regional writing, gritty noir, classic PI. You can cavil that Burke is repeating himself--or you can rejoice that Burke is continuing to enlarge his pool of intense, lyrical crime novels. --Kelly Flynn

Review

James Lee Burke is the heavyweight champ, a great American novelist whose work, taken individually or as a whole, is unsurpassed. (Michael Connelly)

A gorgeous prose stylist. (A gorgeous prose stylist.)

Richly deserves to be described now as one of the finest crime writers America has ever produced. (Daily Mail)

There are not many crime writers about whom one might invoke the name of Zola for comparison, but Burke is very much in that territory. His stamping ground is the Gulf coast, and one of the great strengths of his work has always been the atmospheric background of New Orleans and the bayous. His big, baggy novels are always about much more than the mechanics of the detective plot; his real subject, like the French master, is the human condition, seen in every situation of society. (Independent)

The king of Southern noir. (Daily Mirror)

His lyrical prose, his deep understanding of what makes people behave as they do, and his control of plot and pace are masterly. (Sunday Telegraph)

One of the finest American writers. (Guardian)

When it comes to literate, pungently characterised American crime writing, James Lee Burke has few peers. (Daily Express)

About this edition

• Publisher: Orion
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0752841548
• ISBN 13: 9780752841540
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336