James Lee Burke: Bitteroot

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Burke continues his love affair with Montana in Bitterroot, a sequel to Heartwood and Cimarron Rose. In a landscape where elk herd in meadows of wildflowers and cottonwoods line copper-coloured streams there is a dark heart inhabited by militia men and ghosts. The ghosts are massacred Indians, "saddle preachers", wagoners struck down by cholera and typhus on their way to somewhere else, "the wandering spirits of Custer".

Doc Voss, a tortured Vietnam vet, has his own ghosts. When his daughter is gang-raped, the DNA evidence is lost and the prime suspect burned alive. Former Texas Ranger-turned-lawyer Billy Bob Holland is on a fly-fishing holiday with the Vosses and Doc is going to need a good lawyer. Billy Bob knows the gentle and complicated Doc had the potential for violence and Billy Bob has to figure out whether his old friend is capable of violent retribution.

There's a complicated sub-plot involving a psychopathic killer, newly released from prison, who is determined to track down Billy Bob and indulge in a little violent retribution himself.

Burke's plots are labyrinthine but he tells his stories of strange characters with strange secrets with a simplicity which belies the beauty of his writing.

Hodder Moa Beckett

$37.95