Jamie Harrison’s newest book, The River View is packed with all the rural Montana mystery, generational conflict, and chilling one-liners that the series has been known for.

BY MAGGIE NEAL DOHERTY

Twenty-four years after publishing the fourth book in her celebrated Jules Clement series, Livingston novelist Jamie Harrison has gifted fans with the long-anticipated fifth installment, published in August of 2024. The newest book, The River View is packed with all the rural Montana mystery, generational conflict, and chilling one-liners that the series has been known for—and then more.

“There is a central demoralizing fact of life that no matter how you leave it, by choice or illness or accident, intact or in shreds, your mortal shell will become someone else’s problem,” Harrison writes in The River View. Indeed, death remains a central plot motivator in the latest volume, but the circumstances for her stalwart Jules Clement have changed since the last book, Blue Deer Thaw. Jules, now the former sheriff of the small southwestern Montana town of Blue Deer, is working as an archeologist and begrudgingly, to make ends meet, toiling as a private investigator. Although he’s left the force and is determined to focus on his wife and baby, dead bodies continue to give him problems.

Harrison, who seamlessly blends literary fiction with features of the best mysteries, introduced the world to Jules Clement in the series’ opener, The Edge of the Crazies, published in 1995. Jules is a native of Blue Deer—a fictional small and weird town infused with shades of the author’s own Livingston: unrelenting powerful wind, clueless Yellowstone tourists, and a hotel that resembles the iconic Murray. For all the resemblances with Livingston, it’s safe to say Blue Deer has a much higher rate of crime.

In the first book, Jules has returned home after spending his 20s abroad as an archeologist. He surprised his family and friends when he switched careers and found himself elected as sheriff. It’s the same line of work that killed his father, Ansel, who was shot to death during a traffic stop in 1972. In Harrison’s first four books, Jules solves confounding cases with his trademark level-headed demeanor peppered with a sense of humor, a presumed macabre byproduct of working with the dead. Jules strives to be like his father, fair and open-minded, and he lives up to these aspirations— mostly. His youth is littered with reckless behavior, and until he falls for Caroline, a fellow deputy, his romantic exploits are infamous. Not much escapes the attention of a small town.

After shooting a man in book four, Blue Deer Thaw, Jules quits. The death wasn’t without cause: The victim killed another officer and wounded Caroline. What troubled Jules wasn’t the actual death. “He quit because shooting the man and watching him bleed out caused him no remorse, and he knew he’d never get that song out of his head again,” Harrison writes in The River View. Jules wasn’t traumatized; he was terrified of his own volatility. At the end of Blue Deer Thaw, Jules and Caroline left town.

The River View picks up a few years later after they’ve returned home with dreams of building a house on the ancestral Clement plot along an idyllic bend in the Yellowstone River. Jules has forsworn the badge but Caroline returns to law enforcement only to suffer beneath the current acting sheriff, a blundering drunk who only complicates matters. Like the previous novels, The River View is an episodic tale, revealed in a fraught six-day period where Caroline tries to solve the suspicious death of a local priest amid frantic reports of “crazy Russians” running amok between Blue Deer and Gardiner. Jules can’t escape trouble, either. He finds himself embroiled in a property dispute with his neighbors, and his contract with the county to survey the historical remains of a potter’s field isn’t without headaches. As if the exhausted new dad didn’t have enough to deal with, his mother is requesting he investigate the one case he’d rather avoid, the shooting of his father when Jules was 13 years old. They know how Ansel died but not why. Despite the two-decade hiatus between books, Harrison offers Jules no reprieve.

The River View is Harrison’s seventh novel. In between books four and five of the series, the daughter of literary legend Jim Harrison published The Widow Nash, a historical novel. Also set in Livingston, the 2017 book garnered Harrison a Reading the West Award and a spot as a finalist for that year’s High Plains Book Award. In 2021, she published a contemporary family saga titled The Center of Everything. Also set in her hometown, Harrison uses Livingston’s dynamic and unforgiving Yellowstone River as a feature of both healing and destruction in all her books. To commemorate the return of Jules Clement, her publisher, Counterpoint Press, has reissued new editions of the previous four books.

The landscape of the high plains in southwestern Montana is as much a character as Jules himself. The Crazy Mountains on the setting’s northeastern horizon are perhaps an aptly conditioned (and named) range to motivate its residents and tourists alike to act poorly. Freak late spring snowstorms kill; floods wipe out property boundaries that will surface in bloody tensions for future generations; and the wind—oh the wind—it’ll drive anyone crazy. Distinctive crimes, some of them the kinds that can happen in any town despite its size, and others that can only occur in the cauldrons of Yellowstone, are the hallmark of this engrossing series.

Despite the break between Jules and her other novels, Harrison returns to Blue Deer with her wry and absurdist humor. Her sentences often pack a punch, like this quip from the latest: “The nurse named Marina thought she’d rarely seen such a polite suicide, or such a bad marriage.” For such a small town, Blue Deer has more than its share of suicides and bad marriages. The Montana that Harrison writes of isn’t the potent mythical landscape boasting stereotypical heroic cowboys or other highly dramatized tropes featured in popular TV shows like “Yellowstone.” Rodeos, cattle and trophy homes are showcased throughout the series set in the 1990s, but Harrison applies a more realistic—if not caustic—treatment to her characters. Blue Deer is a place with packed bars, parents who beat their children, and an underfunded and understaffed sheriff’s department trying to keep the peace in a county that dwarfs the size of most states clinging to the coast of the Atlantic.

Blue Deer is beautiful and filled with people Jules loves, which is why he returned, twice now, but it’s also tragic.

The River View brings such themes home with emphasis on Jules’s greatest tragedy and the one he’s long avoided. He can’t ignore his mother’s desire to learn about Ansel’s final moments before the shotgun fired at close range. Jules’s nemesis returns to Blue Deer, rendering any avoidance of his father’s death impossible. Jules may have surrendered his badge, but that doesn’t mean he’s entirely free from the dead.

Maggie Neal Doherty is a freelance journalist, opinion columnist, and book critic and lives with her family in Kalispell, Montana. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Washington Post, LA Times, SKI, and more.