Bitterroot (Holland Family Series)

by James Lee Burke Narrated by Tom Stechschulte

Overview

Set in the rugged Bitterroot valley of Montana -- home to celebrities seeking to escape the pressures of public life and xenophobes dedicated to establishing a bulkhed of patriotic paranoia -- Bitterroot features Blly Bob Holland, former Texas Ranger and now a Texas-based lawyer, who has come to Big Sky country at the request of an old friend in trouble.

And big trouble it is, not just for his friend, but for Billy Bob himself -- in the form of Wyatt Dixon, a recent prison parolee sworn to kill Billy Bob as revenge for both his imprisonment and his sister's death, both of which he blames on the former Texas lawman. As the mysteries multiply and the body count mounts, the listener is drawn deeper and deeper into the tortured mind of Billy Bob Holland, an incredibly complex hero, tormented by the mistakes of his past and driven to make things -- all things -- right. What makes him especially facinationg is that beneath the guise of justice for the weak and downtrodden lies a tendency for violence that at all times becomes more terrifying than the danger he is trying to eradicate.

Crafted with the lyrical prose and the elegiac tome that have inspired many critics to compare James lee Burke to William Faulkner, Bitterroot is a thriller that surpasses the success of his previous novels.

Editorial Reviews

bn.com

The Barnes & Noble Review
Ex-Texas Ranger Billy Bob Holland makes his third appearance (after Heartwood and the Edgar Award-winning Cimarron Rose) in James Lee Burke's dark, sorrowful, appropriately titled new novel, Bitterroot. This time out, Burke takes Holland out of the familiar environs of Deaf Smith, Texas, and moves him to Montana, where he becomes enmeshed in an interlocking series of brutal -- and brutalizing -- events.

Ostensibly, Bill Bob Has come to Montana for an extended fishing vacation with long-time friend Tobin "Doc" Voss, a widowed Vietnam vet and a man of strong, if contradictory, principles. Voss, an impassioned environmentalist, has lobbied publicly against the incursions of a local mining corporation and has made some powerful enemies, a fact that becomes clear when a trio of drug-addled bikers are sent to rape and terrorize his teenaged daughter, Maisey. In the aftermath of that rape, the leader of the bikers is found burned to death in his bed. Doc, of course, emerges as the primary suspect, and finds himself arrested for premeditated murder.

Billy Bob Holland's subsequent investigation begins with Maisey's rape and moves steadily outward, encompassing pedophilia, organized crime, right-wing extremism, and virtually every possible combination of personal and institutional corruption, all of which stand in stark contrast to the pristine, vulnerable beauty of the Montana landscape. Participants in this grim complex of narratives include an alcoholic mystery novelist, an embittered federal agent, a psychopathic ex-con with a very personal agenda, an undercover informant with a hidden motive for murder, and a local physician who has lost both her husband and son, and whose life has collapsed beneath her insupportable grief.

At the center of all this is Billy Bob Holland himself, a fundamentally decent man who is literally haunted by a specter from his past, and who must constantly confront his "abiding anger" and his extreme capacity for violence. Like Dave Robichaux, Burke's other series hero, he is both a witness to and participant in the moral crises of the age. In Bitterroot, his urgent, eloquent narrative voice is as compelling as ever, lending depth and credibility to this disturbing, beautifully crafted book. (Bill Sheehan)

Bill Sheehan reviews horror, suspense, and science fiction for Cemetery Dance, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and other publications. His book-length critical study of the fiction of Peter Straub, At the Foot of the Story Tree, has been published by Subterranean Press (www.subterraneanpress.com).

This is the latest in Burke's relatively new Billy Bob Holland series, about an ex-Texas Ranger-turned-attorney who works in Deaf Smith, Texas. In this outing Billy Bob travels to Montana to visit friend and fellow Vietnam veteran Doc Voss, who gets in a tangle with some local bikers, embarrassing one with some fancy Asian fighting techniques. Soon, Billy Bob's best bud and favorite detective, Temple Carrol, shows up with Billy Bob's son, Lucas, who himself gets involved with an attractive Native American woman, Sue Lynn Big Medicine, who happens to be an undercover detective. The bad guys are represented nicely: There are several nasty boys, the most interesting of which is Wyatt Dixon, an ex-con and rodeo clown. Last but not least, there's L.Q. Navarro, the ghost of Billy Bob's best friend and partner whom Billy accidentally shot and killed. Navarro, always striking a movie cowboy pose and twirling his hat, occasionally shows up offering counsel. Billy Bob always has a question for his old friend about how to fix things, and, in this story, there's plenty that needs fixing. But who cares? After all, it's James Lee Burke in time for summer.
—Randy Michael Signor

(Excerpted Review)

Library Journal

How many bad guys can you fit into one crime novel? Too many, in the case of Bitterroot, Burke's latest Billy Bob Holland episode set in Missoula, MT. Violent bikers, West Coast mobsters, paramilitary types, indifferent agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and corrupt mining company personnel all figure into this rather confusing and disjointed plot. The abridged format probably aggravates the problem. As usual, the author paints vivid pictures: his descriptions enable listeners to see the Montana scenery and feel emotions with the characters, who are interesting and complex. Narrator Will Patton effectively captures the mood of the book. Burke fans will want this, despite its flaws. Recommended for suspense/ mystery collections where Burke is popular. Christine Valentine, Davenport Univ., Kalamazoo, MI Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Billy Bob Holland (Heartwood) 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.

From the Publisher

The New York Times James Lee Burke writes exceptionally clean, unforced prose that has a pronounced streak of poetry in it.

FEB/MAR 02 - AudioFile

Billy Bob Holland visits Doc Voss, his old Vietnam War buddy, in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana. After Doc’s daughter is brutally raped, her attackers are tortured and murdered. It falls to Holland to clear Doc of the charges. Montana is the perfect backdrop for Burke, whose characters share an abhorrence for the tyranny of rules. From militant white su-premacists, militia, religious cult members, and sleazy bikers to Native Americans, privacy-loving locals, and Holland himself, Burke presents all points of view, rational and rabid. Tom Stechschulte’s powerful narration adds depth to Burke’s tightly controlled, richly poetic prose. He provides Holland with an authentic Texas twang, and his compelling voice easily changes from sarcasm to sorrow. Burke is a master storyteller, whether in the Dave Robicheaux series or here, with ex-Texas Ranger Holland. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170973903
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	07/17/2012
Series:	Holland Family Series , #5
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Doc Voss's folks were farmers of German descent, Mennonite pacifists who ran a few head of Brahman outside of Deaf Smith, Texas, and raised beans and melons and tomatoes and paid their taxes and generally went their own way. When Doc got his draft notice his senior year in high school, a lot of us thought he might apply for exemption as a conscientious objector. Instead, Doc enlisted in the Navy and became a hospital corpsman attached to the Marines.

Then he got hooked up with Force Reconnaissance and ended up a SEAL and both a helicopter and fixed-wing pilot who did extractions on the Cambodian border. In fact, Doc became one of the most decorated participants in the Vietnam War.

The night Doc returned home he burned his uniform in the backyard of his house, methodically hanging each piece from a stick over a fire that swirled out of a rusted oil drum, dissolving his Marine-issue tropicals into glowing threadworms. He joined a fundamentalist church, one even more radical in its views than his family's traditional faith. When asked to give witness, he rose in the midst of the congregation and calmly recited a story of a village incursion that made his fellow parishioners in the slat-board church house weep and tremble.

At the end of harvest season he disappeared into Mexico. We heard rumors that Doc was an addict, living in a hut on the Bay of Campeche, his mind gone, his hair and beard like a lion's mane, his body pocked with sores.

I received a grimed, pencil-written postcard from him that read: "Dear Billy Bob, Don't let the politicians or the generals get you. I swim with dolphins in the morning. The ocean is full of light and the dolphins speak to me as one of their own. At least I think they do.

"Your bud, the guy who used to be Tobin Voss."

But two years later Doc came back to us, gaunt, his face shaved, his hair cropped like a convict's, a notebook full of poems stuffed down in his duffel bag.

He worked through the summer with his father and mother, selling melons and cantaloupes and strawberries off a tailgate outside of San Antonio, then enrolled at the university in San Marcos. Before we knew it, Doc graduated and went on to Baylor and received a medical degree.

We stopped worrying about Doc, in an almost self-congratulatory way, as you do when an errant relative finally becomes what you thought he should have always been. Doc never talked about the war, except in a collection of poems he published, then in a collection of stories based on the poems, one that perhaps a famous film director stole from in producing an award-winning movie about the Vietnam War.

Doc ran a clinic in Deaf Smith and married a girl from Montana. When he lost her in a plane crash five years ago, he handled tragedy in his own life as he had handled the war. He didn't talk about it.

Nor of the fires that had never died inside him or the latent potential for violence that the gentleness in his eyes denied.

Copyright © 2001 by James Lee Burke

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