Review: Swan Peak

Swan Peak by James Lee Burke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

One more and I’ve caught up on Dave Robicheaux to date. I’ve enjoyed this series, especially on audio with Will Patton narrating. But perhaps in having listened to more than 20 of these books, I have become a bit jaded. I didn’t find this one as excellent as most. First, instead of taking place in humid rural Louisiana, this one takes place in Montana. In the Louisiana books, the locations really become like a character in the story, and you get to where you can feel the oppressive heat, taste the spicy food, and you expect the Southern accent in conversation. But his Montana stories are much more non-descript. The boring locations didn’t help the story.

The other major difference was the way the story was structured. I recall Burke’s other stories felt very connected. Here, I noticed a number of scenes, some many pages in length, but often without connecting detail. You would be following a story about Robicheaux visiting a crime location, then the next scene he shows up somewhere entirely unexpected. You don’t know how he got there, how much time has gone by, what the intention is, the basics. You end up having to figure it out, often without much help from Burke. It felt like this was the result of a bunch of writing exercises to develop scenes. Or worse, it felt like one of those excessively abridged audiobooks where you know you are missing events and motivation in order to fit the story on two cassettes. Ugh.

And speaking of scenes, this was yet another of Burke’s books that included the casino business and a movie star, although it felt like he just was ticking these elements off of a story checklist. There are casinos and movie stars in a majority of these stories, odd since they aren’t based in hotbeds of moviemaking or legal gambling, but there you go.

Despite the lack of connective tissue between scenes, those scenes are written very well. Both maddening and enjoyable in turns.

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