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Jules Clement #2
Going Local
The sequel to Jamie Harrison's The Edge of the Crazies, Going Local celebrates the Wrangle, the annual rodeo in Blue Deer Montana. In addition to bareback riding, saddle bronco and team roping, this year's competition has the misfortune to include contestants losing body parts and an enraged bronco who kicks participants to death. Jules Clement is Blue Deer's young sheriff, who while cleaning up and calming the nerves of his citizenry, finds himself investigating the murder of an environmental lawyer and his girlfriend. With the help of a few of the town's eccentrics, Jules is able to track down the killer and uncover an elaborate land grabbing development scheme that, strangely, has ties to the rodeo.
1 pages, Audio CD
First published August 18, 1996
22 people are currently reading
134 people want to read
About the author
Jamie Harrison
8 books132 followersJamie Harrison is the author of six novels: The Center of Everything (January 2021, Counterpoint), The Widow Nash (2017), and the four Jules Clement/Blue Deer mysteries, slated to be reissued soon by Counterpoint Press: The Edge of the Crazies, Going Local, An Unfortunate Prairie Occurrence, and Blue Deer Thaw. She was awarded the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Reading the West Book Award for The Widow Nash, and was a finalist for the High Plains Book Award.
The Center of Everything (2021) was a January pick by Oprah Magazine, People Magazine, and Indie Next, with a Rave status at Book Marks: https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/the...
The Center of Everything (2021) was a January pick by Oprah Magazine, People Magazine, and Indie Next, with a Rave status at Book Marks: https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/the...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
July 26, 2013
This is the second of Jamie Harrison's quirky mysteries set in the small fictional town of Blue Deer, which is nestled up against the Crazy Mountains in southwestern Montana. All the principal characters from the first book, The Edge Of The Crazies, appear again, including the county's laid-back sheriff, Jules Clements, who is the main protagonist.
It's now the middle of summer, and Jules and his fellow townspeople are gearing up for the annual Wrangle, a rodeo that draws large numbers of tourists into the small community for a party that, even under the best of circumstances, can be a headache for the tiny sheriff's department.
Things begin to go downhill in a big way when someone reports a tent floating in a reservoir near Blue Deer. Jules heads out to investigate, anticipating a nice, lazy afternoon away from the office. But when it turns out that there are two bodies floating inside the tent, Jules' lazy afternoon quickly melts away.
The victims are a local environmental attorney, Otto Scobey, and his young girlfriend who had been camping near the reservoir. It quickly becomes apparent that their deaths were no accident; someone in a very large truck ran over the tent and then pushed it and its occupants into the water.
The dead lawyer had been a principal in the development of a major new resort complex. Everyone insists that Otto was well liked, that he had no problems, and that he was totally cool with the fact that his ex-wife, Sylvia, also a partner in the development, was now in a relationship with film director Hugh Lesy, the third major partner.
As Jules investigates, however, he senses problems below the surface of the relationship among the resort's developers. While he attempts to tease out the truth of the relationship and find the killer, he's also forced to deal with a wide variety of other eccentric characters who have made their way to Blue Deer, including a sexy blonde who quickly has Jules in her sights. Jules' problems will only multiply several times over when the Wrangle commences and the fun really begins.
Jamie Harrison has woven here another entertaining story set against the background of the new West where, in places like Blue Deer, Hollywood celebrities and other newcomers are mixing with long-time natives, not always harmoniously. Jules Clement would remind no one of Matt Dillon or of any other Old West lawman and it's great fun to get reacquainted with him and the other characters who populated the first book in this series. Anyone who enjoyed The Edge of the Crazies will certainly want to find Going Local.
It's now the middle of summer, and Jules and his fellow townspeople are gearing up for the annual Wrangle, a rodeo that draws large numbers of tourists into the small community for a party that, even under the best of circumstances, can be a headache for the tiny sheriff's department.
Things begin to go downhill in a big way when someone reports a tent floating in a reservoir near Blue Deer. Jules heads out to investigate, anticipating a nice, lazy afternoon away from the office. But when it turns out that there are two bodies floating inside the tent, Jules' lazy afternoon quickly melts away.
The victims are a local environmental attorney, Otto Scobey, and his young girlfriend who had been camping near the reservoir. It quickly becomes apparent that their deaths were no accident; someone in a very large truck ran over the tent and then pushed it and its occupants into the water.
The dead lawyer had been a principal in the development of a major new resort complex. Everyone insists that Otto was well liked, that he had no problems, and that he was totally cool with the fact that his ex-wife, Sylvia, also a partner in the development, was now in a relationship with film director Hugh Lesy, the third major partner.
As Jules investigates, however, he senses problems below the surface of the relationship among the resort's developers. While he attempts to tease out the truth of the relationship and find the killer, he's also forced to deal with a wide variety of other eccentric characters who have made their way to Blue Deer, including a sexy blonde who quickly has Jules in her sights. Jules' problems will only multiply several times over when the Wrangle commences and the fun really begins.
Jamie Harrison has woven here another entertaining story set against the background of the new West where, in places like Blue Deer, Hollywood celebrities and other newcomers are mixing with long-time natives, not always harmoniously. Jules Clement would remind no one of Matt Dillon or of any other Old West lawman and it's great fun to get reacquainted with him and the other characters who populated the first book in this series. Anyone who enjoyed The Edge of the Crazies will certainly want to find Going Local.
October 3, 2018
I read everything in this brief but memorable series back when it was first published. I don't recall all of the particulars, but it's a humorous mystery series with an eccentric, whimsical edge to it. I wasn't writing reviews back then, and for that matter, the internet was just a wee baby thing anyway; I just walked into a Seattle book store, found them, bought them, brought them home and read them. I was so sad when new ones failed to appear, because I felt like this was becoming one of my main go-to series. Big fun.
October 7, 2017
I found this second Jules Clement mystery entertaining and engrossing. I like the characters and the humor, and look forward to reading numbers three and four (but first I’d better acquire them!)
February 1, 2021
Going loco might have been a better title. Still not crazy about the series but I found the lead character, Jules Clement, more like able in this installment.
August 5, 2024
Probably more like three and a half stars. I was familiar with this Montana author but had not read any of her books. She writes both this mystery series and stand alone novels. I can’t put my finger on what annoyed me, maybe her writing style and sentence construction. But having said that I liked the sheriff, Jules and her descriptions of a small southwestern Montana town are right on— police reports, tourists, rodeo and land/power grabs. I will be reading the first in the series.
November 29, 2024
3.75
The second entry in this newly reissued series featuring Sheriff Jules Clement, doing his best to maintain law and order in the small, unruly town of Blue Deer, Montana. The problem is, after decades with no murders in town, there’s lately been something of a mini-wave of them. The latest have to do with a luxury property development and involve people Jules has known since he was a kid.
The second entry in this newly reissued series featuring Sheriff Jules Clement, doing his best to maintain law and order in the small, unruly town of Blue Deer, Montana. The problem is, after decades with no murders in town, there’s lately been something of a mini-wave of them. The latest have to do with a luxury property development and involve people Jules has known since he was a kid.
March 7, 2025
This was a 3.5 read for me, rounded up. I liked it overall, though did seem to drag a bit at times. I did enjoy the on-going issues that a sheriff and his deputies had to deal with. There were bulls escaping pins, animals in trees, people arguing, and all kinds of day-to-day minutiae of life. But there were also several very weird kinds of murders. I plan to read the next in this series.
January 26, 2019
Those of you looking for the precisely ticking mechanism of a tightly-plotted mystery, where motives are carefully teased out from a few scant but telling clues and a clever investigator drives ineluctably towards the only possible conclusion, that still somehow manages to be a surprise even though all the cues are scattered throughout the text: this series may not be for you. Jules Clement, the sheriff of Blue Deer (a lightly fictionalized Livingston, Montana), is tired. He is operating on too little sleep, too many hangovers, and too few deputies, in a town that remembers his well-liked, mildly crooked sheriff father fondly but regards him, a postdoc archaeologist who decided he missed the mountains and the stunningly empty skies of home, with a certain degree of wary mistrust. He is a lateral thinker and has a certain Scandinavian fatalism that, combined with his education, persistence, and diligence, leaves him comfortable nowhere, and renders most of what he does circuitous and occasionally aggravating to himself and everyone around him. He has a local's memory but an outsider's inability to leave well enough alone.
I can relate. My family has deep roots in southwestern Montana, stretching back to before the territory was a state, and I grew up visiting the territorial capitals of Virginia City and Bannack with some regularity as they weren't far from the white elephant of a suburban colonial mansion my grandfather built as a retirement home outside Sheridan. I went to school in Missoula and for a while lived with a woman who grew up in Belgrade, a little town not far outside Bozeman that's not too dissimilar from Livingston or Blue Deer. I've been down the valley that runs south from I-90, past Ted Turner's and Harrison Ford's spreads, crossing over the Yellowstone River as it wends its way down the valley, past the road that can be turned into a runway for the small planes of well-to-do visitors to Chico Hot Springs, past the now-abandoned survivalist compound of the Church Universal and Triumphant, which was undone as much by the EPA, for its illegal buried fuel tanks, as the contradictions nestled within its doctrines, finally to the hot springs where people find the warm, but not too hot, spots in the river during the dead gray cold of Montana winters. It is a stunning, almost inhumanly beautiful place, and as deeply weird as any place populated primarily by ranchers, retired libertarian aerospace executives, unemployed lumberjacks, and various other people doing their thing in a place far too big for them can be. Which is pretty weird.
Not all of this soaks into Harrison's writing, but enough does. She has an assured sense of place, of the foibles of the settlers who came to be natives of the area (and the natives who preceded them, and the natives who were swept up and dropped there during the genocidal purges of the frontier days and residential schools), and a jaundiced eye towards both Montana's libertarian parochialism and the pretense of folks from elsewhere who are overawed by the beauty but last a couple winters before fleeing somewhere a little less resolutely grim.
She also has a pedigree – her father was Jim Harrison, an author beloved by my own father, but towards whom I have more mixed feelings. Regardless of that, his Legends of the Fall is as good a Montanan bildungsroman as there's ever likely to be. While he tends towards a certain level of Hemingwayesque affectation, he is able to incisively limn character in a few words as well as just about anybody, and he passed this skill to his daughter. (As a brief aside, when Jim lived in Montana, his friend Richard Brautigan also settled in the valley, and Brautigan's daughter Ianthe wrote a luminous and sad memoir, You Can't Catch Death, that describes the hippie shitkicker Montana in which she, and Jamie, grew up.)
This book is a transitional book in the series, which started with a bang in Going Local and really picked up speed in the last two books, An Unfortunate Prairie Occurrence and Blue Deer Thaw. The book starts with Jules dealing with the consequences of the first book and lacks some of the sparkle of the latter books because Jules, like the book, is caught in between situations and is mostly just trying to make sense of things. It's a quiet bummer that's saved by the sharpness of the observation, of the memorable characters, and a few deft set pieces and Harrison's unwillingness to allow her characters to be either saintly cowboys or noirish antiheroes. Jules can be kind of a dick, but his reasons make sense, and Harrison will allow the omniscient narrator to acidly pass judgment on his foibles on occasion.
If one theme runs through all four books, it's that Jules, who thinks of himself as a pragmatist and a cynic, is constantly brought up short by the deeper currents of the history of his community. Grudges run deep and pretty much everybody has something to hide, or has been hiding it so long that to drag it into sunlight is to create a new, ugly wound that may not, in the final analysis, be worth it. There are no wise old patriarchs or virtuous old grandmothers, just people who have made their peace – or not – with the circumstances of their lives, and to try to right old wrongs often results in Jules finding out things he really didn't want to know. He's no Poirot or Holmes observing from the outside, he's not just implicated but he carries the consequences of these actions forward with him.
Like a lot of people commenting on these books, I'm a little disappointed that Harrison only wrote the four books, but I think there may be a reason she couldn't carry the series forward: the conventions of the murder mystery, with their high degree of violence, mixes poorly with the realism of her stories. Jules the sheriff, and his community, starts this book traumatized and only partially recovered from the events of the first book, and the events in this one act as the foundation for the remaining two books in the series. Jules thinks of quitting his job constantly, and the accumulated weight of trauma takes up an increasing amount of the text. By the end of Blue Deer Thaw, there's no realistic way to carry it forward, and by that point Jules has earned some relief.
This is the weakest book in the series, but I still think it deserves as high a rating as I can give it; stories that work well as both genre fiction and novels are rare, and I'm not even going to pretend that Harrison's ability to evoke a place that I miss but deeply love doesn't bleed over into my affection for her books. But I push these books on people constantly. They are books I return to frequently, and every time they pull off the neat trick of being both a nostalgic escape and and some of the clearest-eyed character studies I've ever read.
I can relate. My family has deep roots in southwestern Montana, stretching back to before the territory was a state, and I grew up visiting the territorial capitals of Virginia City and Bannack with some regularity as they weren't far from the white elephant of a suburban colonial mansion my grandfather built as a retirement home outside Sheridan. I went to school in Missoula and for a while lived with a woman who grew up in Belgrade, a little town not far outside Bozeman that's not too dissimilar from Livingston or Blue Deer. I've been down the valley that runs south from I-90, past Ted Turner's and Harrison Ford's spreads, crossing over the Yellowstone River as it wends its way down the valley, past the road that can be turned into a runway for the small planes of well-to-do visitors to Chico Hot Springs, past the now-abandoned survivalist compound of the Church Universal and Triumphant, which was undone as much by the EPA, for its illegal buried fuel tanks, as the contradictions nestled within its doctrines, finally to the hot springs where people find the warm, but not too hot, spots in the river during the dead gray cold of Montana winters. It is a stunning, almost inhumanly beautiful place, and as deeply weird as any place populated primarily by ranchers, retired libertarian aerospace executives, unemployed lumberjacks, and various other people doing their thing in a place far too big for them can be. Which is pretty weird.
Not all of this soaks into Harrison's writing, but enough does. She has an assured sense of place, of the foibles of the settlers who came to be natives of the area (and the natives who preceded them, and the natives who were swept up and dropped there during the genocidal purges of the frontier days and residential schools), and a jaundiced eye towards both Montana's libertarian parochialism and the pretense of folks from elsewhere who are overawed by the beauty but last a couple winters before fleeing somewhere a little less resolutely grim.
She also has a pedigree – her father was Jim Harrison, an author beloved by my own father, but towards whom I have more mixed feelings. Regardless of that, his Legends of the Fall is as good a Montanan bildungsroman as there's ever likely to be. While he tends towards a certain level of Hemingwayesque affectation, he is able to incisively limn character in a few words as well as just about anybody, and he passed this skill to his daughter. (As a brief aside, when Jim lived in Montana, his friend Richard Brautigan also settled in the valley, and Brautigan's daughter Ianthe wrote a luminous and sad memoir, You Can't Catch Death, that describes the hippie shitkicker Montana in which she, and Jamie, grew up.)
This book is a transitional book in the series, which started with a bang in Going Local and really picked up speed in the last two books, An Unfortunate Prairie Occurrence and Blue Deer Thaw. The book starts with Jules dealing with the consequences of the first book and lacks some of the sparkle of the latter books because Jules, like the book, is caught in between situations and is mostly just trying to make sense of things. It's a quiet bummer that's saved by the sharpness of the observation, of the memorable characters, and a few deft set pieces and Harrison's unwillingness to allow her characters to be either saintly cowboys or noirish antiheroes. Jules can be kind of a dick, but his reasons make sense, and Harrison will allow the omniscient narrator to acidly pass judgment on his foibles on occasion.
If one theme runs through all four books, it's that Jules, who thinks of himself as a pragmatist and a cynic, is constantly brought up short by the deeper currents of the history of his community. Grudges run deep and pretty much everybody has something to hide, or has been hiding it so long that to drag it into sunlight is to create a new, ugly wound that may not, in the final analysis, be worth it. There are no wise old patriarchs or virtuous old grandmothers, just people who have made their peace – or not – with the circumstances of their lives, and to try to right old wrongs often results in Jules finding out things he really didn't want to know. He's no Poirot or Holmes observing from the outside, he's not just implicated but he carries the consequences of these actions forward with him.
Like a lot of people commenting on these books, I'm a little disappointed that Harrison only wrote the four books, but I think there may be a reason she couldn't carry the series forward: the conventions of the murder mystery, with their high degree of violence, mixes poorly with the realism of her stories. Jules the sheriff, and his community, starts this book traumatized and only partially recovered from the events of the first book, and the events in this one act as the foundation for the remaining two books in the series. Jules thinks of quitting his job constantly, and the accumulated weight of trauma takes up an increasing amount of the text. By the end of Blue Deer Thaw, there's no realistic way to carry it forward, and by that point Jules has earned some relief.
This is the weakest book in the series, but I still think it deserves as high a rating as I can give it; stories that work well as both genre fiction and novels are rare, and I'm not even going to pretend that Harrison's ability to evoke a place that I miss but deeply love doesn't bleed over into my affection for her books. But I push these books on people constantly. They are books I return to frequently, and every time they pull off the neat trick of being both a nostalgic escape and and some of the clearest-eyed character studies I've ever read.
November 25, 2018
Actual: 2.5
This one left me with ambiguous feelings. I liked the Montana, small town, aspect of the work. I even liked Jules, the sheriff, most of the time. But 1) the whole thing just steeped in depression and despair, which isn't me, and 2) the "mystery" and solving it seemed very disjointed. Maybe it's me, but I still struggled with exactly why everything happened. Don't expect a classic "sit down all the suspects and make the big reveal" like Hercule Poirot, etc.
I had not read the first book in this series, so maybe some things would have been clearer if I had. I'm not too sure I want to read any more right now... too many other books I want to read!
This one left me with ambiguous feelings. I liked the Montana, small town, aspect of the work. I even liked Jules, the sheriff, most of the time. But 1) the whole thing just steeped in depression and despair, which isn't me, and 2) the "mystery" and solving it seemed very disjointed. Maybe it's me, but I still struggled with exactly why everything happened. Don't expect a classic "sit down all the suspects and make the big reveal" like Hercule Poirot, etc.
I had not read the first book in this series, so maybe some things would have been clearer if I had. I'm not too sure I want to read any more right now... too many other books I want to read!
September 22, 2025
When I read The Edge of the Crazies I wrote that I had trouble keeping all the characters straight, but it was a good mystery. Same quibble with this book but the mystery was even less straightforward. Or it got lost in all the secondary and tertiary plot lines, so that by the end of the book I was trying to remember what had started all of this. But I like the main character, Jules Clement, so I'm sure I'll read #3 in the series.
February 24, 2025
Although I opted for 3 stars on the side of acknowledging Harrison's skill in keeping me amused as the grizzly tale unfolded, I reached the end not really caring whodunit, which is not a ringing endorsement for this book. The previous novel, The Edge of the Crazies, definitely has the title appropriate for this one, but I guess 'Going Local' IS the same thing! In any case, the inhabitants of this town give Cabot Cove a run for the money of the Maine killing ground, at least on this July 4th period.
September 28, 2025
Harrison is an ace at place. She captures the stark beauty of Montana and the eccentricity and humor of small-town Western life well, especially the excitement and commotion caused by the annual rodeo. Great characters and interesting plot with both historical and environmental elements. Julian and the other locals are such a treat.
October 2, 2018
So loved these books and so sad she stopped! I don't know exactly when I read these books but after going through all my books to purge some I found these again and realized I needed to put these in goodreads. I'll guess I read these soon after they were published in the 90's...
June 25, 2024
Found myself getting impatient with Blue Deer and its misfits in this second go round with Jules Clement. This small Montana town that supposedly has little or no serious crime has more than its fair share of greed-crazed and drug-addled murderers.
October 23, 2024
I found this very hard to follow. Sometimes almost stream of consciousness. So many backstories of so many characters and not much moving the plot forward. And I’m still looking for the humor others write about. I finally gave up.
July 11, 2017
First book by this author, loved it!! Could barely put it down11
September 3, 2017
Book was confusing, muddled and BORING. Gave up about 3/4 of the way into the book. There are better books to spend my time reading.
November 4, 2024
It might have been my mindset or my attention span, but I had trouble keeping the characters and the subplots straightened out.
March 7, 2025
Fun series set in small town Montana centered around a likable sheriff. There’s a murder or two to solve in there somewhere, but who cares when you have such an engrossing cast of local characters.
August 11, 2025
Really more like 3.5 stars for me. Thanks to my friend Marion for the book!
July 19, 2025
Jules Clement #2.
This series is quirky with intricate plots that are not easy to figure out. Also lots of bodies.
This one had clever chapter titles (#1 did not) which enhanced the narrative.
This series is quirky with intricate plots that are not easy to figure out. Also lots of bodies.
This one had clever chapter titles (#1 did not) which enhanced the narrative.
January 31, 2024
I read this originally when it came out. Harrison has a evocative writing style, especially for a mystery writer, and her character seem very real.
"From where Jules stood on the river, fall smelled of clean clay, water, moistened rock and drying grass and pine. If you were to die of a belly wound, facedown in the wet sand, this was as beautiful a place to do it as any. The soft breeze blended with the sound of water and swirling aspen leaves, and they dug in the midst of violently colored gold-and-orange willow saplings and garnet dog-wood. Jules filtered sand, scraping patiently away at a top layer of teenagers' cigarette butts a few feet in either direction around the body. His familiarity with this end of the island dated back to high school, when it had been the best place to drink and smoke. It still was, despite several new houses and a sheriff whose life experience had made him scarily attuned to misbehavior. Both he and Harvey had giggled out here twenty years earlier, and giggled again now when they found an especially antique roach clip. They didn't show it to Ed, who was now in his mid-fifties and had once been their worst nightmare."
I plan to reread the last two of the series.
"From where Jules stood on the river, fall smelled of clean clay, water, moistened rock and drying grass and pine. If you were to die of a belly wound, facedown in the wet sand, this was as beautiful a place to do it as any. The soft breeze blended with the sound of water and swirling aspen leaves, and they dug in the midst of violently colored gold-and-orange willow saplings and garnet dog-wood. Jules filtered sand, scraping patiently away at a top layer of teenagers' cigarette butts a few feet in either direction around the body. His familiarity with this end of the island dated back to high school, when it had been the best place to drink and smoke. It still was, despite several new houses and a sheriff whose life experience had made him scarily attuned to misbehavior. Both he and Harvey had giggled out here twenty years earlier, and giggled again now when they found an especially antique roach clip. They didn't show it to Ed, who was now in his mid-fifties and had once been their worst nightmare."
I plan to reread the last two of the series.
February 5, 2011
As with the first one in this mystery series set in a small town in Montana, I liked the characters and the setting a lot, and the author's writing style is clever, funny and enjoyable. (3 stars) However, as with the first one, she can't plot a mystery, and I found the ending deeply disappointing -- thrown together and not fair-play at all (as in, on the third to last page we're just told why the background of one of the plotters enabled this person to accomplish all of it -- none of it had been mentioned before). (1 star) I gave the whole series back to the friend who lent it to me, and he convinced me to go ahead and read the third one, because -- he says -- it's the best. I trust him, so I'll give this series one more chance.
September 3, 2014
The best thing about this book was that the events all happened in places I know. I might know them by a different name (names have been changed to protect the innocent towns and bars), but I know them none the less. The story was OK. The characters were alright. Not much of a surprise in the end. A little, but not much really.
January 22, 2012
If only Sheriff Jules Clement would stop moan, groaning and feeling sorry for himself, and if only he would have less days of hangover blues; and if only he would stop acting like a tom cat the story would have been more worth while.
March 15, 2015
One of my favorite quotes from ANY book comes from this particular book:
"Alice epitomized the saw that the lasting legacy of a liberal education as expensive taste but no money with which to indulge it."
"Alice epitomized the saw that the lasting legacy of a liberal education as expensive taste but no money with which to indulge it."
February 27, 2016
#2 in the Jules Clement series.
Sheriff Jules Clement, Blue Deer, MT mystery - A camping couple is crushed by a truck while in their tent. The investigation finds links to a land development project, the local rodeo and mining claims.
Sheriff Jules Clement, Blue Deer, MT mystery - A camping couple is crushed by a truck while in their tent. The investigation finds links to a land development project, the local rodeo and mining claims.
July 1, 2007
Pedestrian mystery set in South Central Montana. Picked it up off the free shelf at the library and put it back there.
Read
November 7, 2008Really funny about small towns
Read
May 16, 2011Jules Clement
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