Losing the plot in Montana

Buy this book online from Amazon.co.uk

Although James Lee Burke's best-known hero is Louisiana cop Dave Robicheaux, he has also written several novels about Billy Bob Holland, once a Texas Ranger, now an attorney in the oddly named town of Deaf Smith, Texas. Billy Bob is visiting an old friend, Vietnam veteran Doc Voss, who lives in a mountain cabin in Montana's Bitterroot Valley, when Voss's teenage daughter is gangraped. One of the bikers responsible is killed, Voss is arrested, and Billy Bob takes on his defence.

Bitterroot vividly illustrates Bishop Heber's proposition: pleasing though every prospect of the valley is, its population is certainly exceedingly vile. Besides the local bikers, a white supremacist militia has its headquarters here; a mining company is polluting the valley's headwaters by leaching out gold with cyanide; organised crime is pursuing the widow of a money-laundering LA lawyer, incinerated, together with his small son, in his car; two prominent local residents are an alcoholic famous author and his nymphomaniac wife (a couple who seem to have sashayed in from Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye); while the final drop of bat's blood is added by a psychopath with the strength of 10, who believes Billy Bob to be responsible for his sister's death and is determined to avenge her.

James Lee Burke could not write badly if he tried: his evocation of the natural beauty of the mountain valley is brilliant, and some individual scenes, heavy with unstated menace and latent violence, are extremely powerful. Nevertheless, Bitterroot comes as a slight disappointment: Billy Bob is constantly being told by the local sheriff, JT Cain, that he doesn't know squat about what is going on, and most readers are likely to share this ignorance. The disparate plot elements seem not to mesh and, as a result, the book lacks the strong narrative drive of its predecessors.

Though Burke can whip most of his rivals to a frazzle even with one hand tied behind his back, he might consider avoiding out-of-state trips in future, and sticking with Texas and Louisiana.