Swan Peak: A Dave Robicheaux Novel

Dave & Clete & Molly are on vacation from New Orleans, back in Big Sky Country Montana when old ghosts of several kinds rear up and murder most foul entangles them with some very very bad customers.

Ah, it's summertime and another James Lee Burke Dave Robicheaux novel. Burke's style has smoothed out to such a pleasurable read that, for my money, he can write a Robicheaux a year forever and it'll suit me fine. He gives a lot of time in this one to Clete Purcell who is a favorite character of mine. Bad bad villains, Burke's poetic touch with scene and setting, unexpected and explosive violence from Dave and Clete, and always good and surprising characters and situations. Burke's earlier work was denser, but like all series writers, time and comfort create a simpler and cleaner style, and while I liked the earlier work for what it gave, I equally admire the smooth delivery of the later stuff. The stars are for fans.

I am a serious fan of James Lee Burke and his protagonists. While not my favorite, I loved reading this book and had difficulty putting it down even when I had finished!

Having read almost the entire literary output of James Lee Burke, I can say there is nothing in his admirable works which reached this level. Swan Peak is a s complex in plot and developed in descriptive detail as any reader could wish. In this big novel, over four hundred pages, there comes a mid point where the many stories seem to be diverging and then Burke starts to entangle them in such a way that the multiple tales, Robicheaux and Purcell, the Wellstones, J. D Gribble, Troyce Nix, and even Sally Dio from an earlier story and all their associets figure in the resolution. Meanwhile Burke explores his theme of the causes and effects of violence in and on the human heart. All of this takes place in an area stretching from Texas to Montana, on farms and in cities, mansions and revival tents, in the forests and along the high trout streams of Montana. At one point Burke speaks of Hemingway and as we observe the fly skipping across the stream in the early morning light, the trout on the campfire frying pan, the coffee pot on the boil we cannot fail to visit the Big Two Hearted River or the streams in the mountains in The Sun also Rises. As the novel comes to a conclusion there is a sense of the importance of "the struggle" in an otherwise dangerous and depressing world and a sense of the continuing need for self forgiveness and a desire for justice.

This is not an easy read. It is not a beach book. It is not happy. It is a serious and thoughtful look at our world by a novelist who has taken the hardboiled detective genre to some new level, that of the literary novel. It demands attention but it repays it in the pleasure that great art always gives. Burke has achieved what will be seen as a true masterpiece.

"Swan Peak" is the seventeenth book in James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux series and, by now, longtime fans of the series probably know Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcell better than they know their own real life first cousins (and might even enjoy their company more). What makes "Swan Peak" different from other Robicheaux novels, though, is that it is the first book in the series to be set entirely someplace other than in south Louisiana, home base for Robicheaux and his sidekick. But even in Montana, Robicheaux and Purcell, being who they are, manage to attract the attention of the same kind of people who have caused them so much grief in New Orleans and New Iberia for several decades.

Being one of the good guys (and these two, despite their numerous flaws, are definitely two of the good guys), even while on summer vacation, is not always easy. It is especially not easy for Clete Purcell who cannot control his mouth when he is hassled by two thuggish security guards for inadvertently camping overnight on private property. And it is not easy for Dave Robicheaux for one simple reason: he is Purcell's best friend, and nothing about being Purcell's friend is easy. Dave, his wife, Molly, and Clete may have come to Montana for a little R&R and lots of fishing, but very little fishing, and even less R&R, is what they get.

When a pair of college students is brutally murdered on a hill that overlooks the property they are staying on, Dave and Clete find themselves slowly sucked into the crime's investigation, an investigation that soon threatens to blow up in their faces when every rock they overturn unmasks yet another lowlife pervert willing to do whatever it takes to remain under the radar of local cops and the FBI.

A James Lee Burke novel is one to be savored and, unlike most novels of its type, Burke's books do not make for quick reading. "Swan Peak," containing several subplots and numerous characters that sometimes cross from one plotline to another, is no exception, demanding to be read with a certain degree of attention if its full impact is to be felt.

Along the way, we meet both a Texas prison guard searching for the escaped prisoner who almost stabbed him to death and that prisoner, a talented country singer and picker who has come to Montana to find the woman he still loves, herself at one time a successful hillbilly singer. But before he can find the man he so badly wants to hurt, the guard finds Candace, a waitress who sees good in him that he does not even see in himself. There are the Wellstone brothers, unscrupulous oil operators from Houston, one of them terribly disfigured by burns but married to the very woman for whom the escaped prisoner is searching. And then there are characters like the sexual predator and tent preacher, Sonny Click, and the insane serial killer who delights in killing in the most painful ways imaginable - lots of characters, lots of subplots, all masterfully tied together by the end of the book into yet another powerful chapter in the lives of Dave Robicheaux and Cletus Purcell.

Don't miss Chapter 17.

Up front I have to say I love James Lee Burke's books. This one I enjoyed
more than the last two he wrote. Again, one has to accept the highly
unlikely premise that everywhere Dave and Clete go, they get into large
doses of trouble. Even a fishing trip in Montana, as far away from their
home turf as possible, turns into a wild ride for the boys. But, who cares? It is always a highly enjoyable trip and Jimmy Lee doesn't disappoint. Burke fans will love it.