Bitterroot [Paperback]

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

America's finest crime writer sends hero Billy Bob Holland deep into Montana - paradise to some, to others a savage wilderness...

When Billy Bob Holland visits his old friend Doc Voss, he finds himself caught up in a horrific tragedy. Doc's daughter has been brutally attacked by bikers, and the ringleader, Lamar Ellison, walks free when the DNA samples 'get lost'. Then Ellison is burned alive and Doc is arrested. So much for Billy Bob's vacation - Doc needs a lawyer, and fast. And that's not all. Newly released killer Wyatt Dixon has tracked Billy Bob to Montana, bent on avenging the death of his sister for which he holds Billy Bob responsible. And Wyatt is only one thread of a tangled web of evil that includes neo-Nazi militias, gold miners who tip cyanide into the rivers, a paedophile ring, and the Mob. As the corpses of the guilty and innocent pile up, Billy Bob stands alone.

James Lee Burke is the author of numerous award-winning novels, many featuring Detective Dave Robicheaux. He lives with his wife, Pearl, in Missoula, Montana.