Seven young women in neighboring Jefferson Davis Parish have been brutally murdered. While the crimes have all the telltale signs of a serial killer, the death of Bernadette Latiolais, a high school honor student, doesn't fit: she is not the kind of hapless and marginalized victim psychopaths usually prey upon.

Robicheaux and his best friend, Clete Purcel, confront Herman Stanga, a notorious pimp and crack dealer whom both men despise. When Stanga turns up dead shortly after a fierce beating by Purcel, in front of numerous witnesses, the case takes a nasty turn, and Clete's career and life are hanging by threads over the abyss.

Adding to Robicheaux's troubles is the matter of his daughter, Alafair, who is on leave from Stanford Law to put the finishing touches on her novel. Her literary pursuit has led her into the arms of Kermit Abelard, celebrated novelist and scion of a once prominent Louisiana family whose fortunes are slowly sinking into the corruption of Louisiana's subculture. Abelard's association with bestselling ex-convict author Robert Weingart, a man who uses and discards people like Kleenex, causes Robicheaux to fear that Alafair might be destroyed by the man she loves. As his daughter seems to drift away from him, he wonders if he has become a victim of his own paranoia.

But as usual, Robicheaux's instincts are proven correct and he finds himself dealing with a level of evil that is greater than any enemy he has confronted in the past. ( )

Excellent dialogue.... ( )

An average Dave Robicheaux novel by Burke would rate 4 or 5 stars. This one is one of the better ones. In fact, I’d agree with another reviewer who states the series should have ended here. The last 50 pages are both an adrenaline packed white knuckle ride and also the most poetic chilling prose I’ve ever read. ( )

Dave Robicheaux is a preternaturally perceptive Cajun detective who lives along the Bayou Teche in New Iberia, La., a Vietnam vet and recovering alcoholic whose hair-trigger emotions swing from rage at injustice to compassion for the disenfranchised.

Dave Robicheaux is 70 years old, and feeling his age. But it isn't Time's winged chariot he hears; it's a ghostly steamboat drifting through the mist on Bayou Teche...a vessel no one else sees, coming for to carry away the souls recently released from earth's bondage. And as if such visions weren't enough to put the notion of his own mortality uppermost in his mind, the forces of evil past and present are raging through the parishes of Southwestern Louisiana, with Dave and his family directly in their path. This story line rumbles and crackles like the electrical storms Burke describes so vividly, and the ending left me feeling I had experienced a very close lightning strike myself. If you've read earlier entries in the series, don't quit before you get to this one. It's one of Burke's best. ( )