Can anyone out there honestly imagine Robicheaux and boozy sidekick Clete Purcel floating the Blackfoot? Or meeting friends downtown for Out to Lunch?
It should come as no surprise, then, that "Swan Peak" - Missoula writer James Lee Burke's 27th novel - finds the maladjusted duo up to their waders in murder and mayhem.
If all it took was a summer in western Montana to tame Robicheaux and Purcel, their considerable readership would be deeply and irrevocably disappointed. So bring on the deviant evangelist up Rock Creek. And the twisted - not to mention, disfigured - crime family with the Swan Lake compound. And the retired University of Montana professor with an abiding distrust of law enforcement, government and all things conventional, but a soft spot for our crime-fighters from the Louisiana bayou.
The summer of '08 is at hand, and a new Dave Robicheaux novel - this one set in our own backyard - is on the shelf.
The vacation is an attempt to escape the heartbreak of post-Katrina New Orleans, the usual backdrop against which Purcel and Robicheaux wreak their righteous, but sometimes wincing to witness, havoc.
"Clete had watched the city of his birth drown," Robicheaux tells us. "He had not recovered, and I was not sure he ever would, and I had hoped Montana would offer a cure that I could not."
Robicheaux's hopes, of course, are quickly dashed, as Purcel runs into the ghosts of misdeeds' past not long after arriving at their host's place up Lolo Creek. Give him credit, though, for trying. Purcel is dutifully camping and fishing and soaking in the loveliness.
"The countryside was grand, the cliffs sheer, the tops of the buttes covered with ponderosa pine, the slopes already blooming with wildflowers," Burke writes. "The air smelled of woods and wet fern and cold stone and humus that stayed in shade twenty-four hours and the iridescent spray drifting off the boulders in the stream."
Then along come two goons, claiming Purcel is trespassing on the boss's property and the vacation - and Purcel's fly rod - are literally snapped in half.
In rapid and delicious succession, the thoroughly messed-up cast of characters comes calling: a Texas gunbull searching for the inmate who buried a shank in his chest, the country-crooning inmate, a sweet and distinctively tattooed dude-ranch cook who falls for the gunbull, the evil brothers who live in the shadow of Swan Peak and seem connected to four recent (and particularly gruesome) murders in Missoula County, the sheriff whose face and personality bear the scars of a war long ago lost.
The cameo appearances are killers: the Amerasian FBI agent alternately interrogating and romancing Purcel, the creepy evangelist harassing and possibly molesting his collegiate converts, the heavily endowed and perpetually tipsy former country music star who is married - unfaithfully, of course - to one of the evil brothers.
And what of the ghost of Sally Dio, the mobster killed in a plane crash for which Purcel may have been responsible? (If you consider sand in the fuel tank an airborne no-no.)
Woven together in Burke's unmatchable style, these souls find salvation and damnation in powerful doses. This is the 17th in the Dave Robicheaux series, and Burke's never been better. He won the first of two Edgar Awards (given to the best mystery novel by the Mystery Writers of America) the last - and only other - time his heroes visited Montana, in 1990 for "Black Cherry Blues."
"Swan Peak" could well fatten his trophy case. The writing is beautiful. The plot is masterfully and intricately woven. There are surprises around every bend in the river.
And our heroes even manage to catch a fish or two.
Missoulian editor Sherry Devlin can be reached at (406) 523-5250 or by e-mail at sdevlin@missoulian.com.
Meet the author
James Lee Burke reads from and signs "Swan Peak" at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Fact & Fiction, 220 N. Higgins Ave., Missoula.
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