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.