The River View
A Jules Clement Novel
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the Reading the West Book Awards
Former sheriff Jules Clement returns in this new installment of the celebrated mystery series, set once again in the wild, strange, windy town of Blue Deer, Montana, where your neighbors or the tourists can be just as deadly as the weather
Jules Clement is back in Blue Deer, working as an archaeologist and private investigator. He’s a mostly happy man: he’s a new father, and he and his wife Caroline are building their dream house on an idyllic patch of river bottomland. But everything that can go wrong will, in terms of money, love, and murder. The horrible neighbors enlist Jules to spy on each other. The county hires him to find out if a road runs over some misplaced bodies in a long-abandoned potter’s field. A former priest with a side hustle in extortion ends up very dead. A crew of Russians in fast cars is running amok through the Montana landscape. All this as an old nemesis returns, pulling Jules back to confront what he’s been avoiding his entire life: the death of his father.
Published alongside newly reissued editions of the entire series, The River View is further proof that “you haven’t been west in any meaningful sense until you’ve been to Blue Deer” (The New York Times).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harrison's riveting fifth adventure for Montana PI Jules Clement (after 2000's Blue Deer Thaw) is worth the wait. In 1972, when Jules was a child, his father, the sheriff of Blue Deer, Mont., was gunned down during a traffic stop. Patrick Bell was convicted of the murder—he claimed he'd been on the way home to kill his unfaithful wife and the sheriff "was in the way"—but the precise circumstances of the crime were never made clear. Now, in 2001, Jules's mother urges him to learn as much as he can about his father's final moments. While Jules reluctantly revisits that case, he juggles others: his meddlesome neighbors separately hire him to spy on one another; a priest's suicide starts to look like it may have been a murder; and Absaroka County hires him to determine where, exactly, the bodies are buried in an abandoned graveyard that officials want to build a road over. Eventually, most of the plot's individual strands come together, with the death of Jules's father as a linchpin. The episodic structure works wonders, with each vignette highlighting Jules's damage as well as his brilliance. Here's hoping the PI's next case arrives sooner than this one did.
