Bitterroot

Bitterroot by James Lee Burke, 334 pages


Billy Bob Holland is a former Texas Ranger (lawman, not baseball player), a lawyer, and has a bit of an itchy trigger finger. When he travels up to Missoula, Montana to visit an old friend, and said old friend's daughter gets sexually assaulted, he embarks on a quest for vengeance, mixing it up with all of the bad seeds in Missoula (and there do seem to be a lot of them, at least in Burke's fictional version of the easy-going college town).

I'll be completely honest: the only reason I read this book is because I grew up in the Montana valley that shares a name with this book. The characters are two-dimensional at best. The plot is pretty convoluted; a flow chart or perhaps a dramatis personae or a timeline would have helped IMMENSELY. And perhaps I'm being nitpicky, but I couldn't pin down what time of year this happened (snow AND wildflowers AND forest fires? Montana may be a magical place, but those don't all happen at the same time), nor could I gauge any sort of passage of time. Kinda wish I'd put this down before I opened it.