Burke is a terrific story teller and has created a memorable and credible main character in Dave Robicheaux.

We meet Robicheaux, who is working part time as a lieutenant detective with the New Iberia parish sheriff’s office in rural Louisiana and part time running his bait shop/boat rental, when he is at the crime scene where a 19 year old prostitute has been brutally murdered and dismembered.  From there, it only gets more violent with a second prostitute murdered and a bunch of very bad guys who accompany Julie ‘Feet’ Balboni a home grown mobster who arrives from New Orleans to keep an eye on his investment in a movie being made starring Elrod Sykes.  There are a bunch of vivid characaters, including Robicheaux’s FBI ‘partner’ Rosie Gomez.  It wasn’t until I was mostly through the book when I realized there were no cell phones, internet references, etc and checked to see when it was written—1993, and yet it seemed as vivid and up to date as if it had been written last week.

The writing is terrific.  Here’s a sample of Burke’s handiwork: “You can find predators at the bus depot almost any time during the twenty-four hour period. But they operate best during the late hours.  That’s usually when the adventurers from Vidalia or De Ridder or Wiggins, Mississippi, have run out of money, energy, and hope of finding a place to sleep besides an empty building or an offical shelter where they’ll be reported as runaways.  It’s not hard to spot the adventurers, either. The corners of their mouths are downturned, their hair is limp and lies like moist string on their necks; often their hands and thin arms are flecked with home-grown tattoos; they wash under their arms with paper towels and brush their teeth in the depot restroom.”  I rest my case!  This is far, far better than the average crime/detective/mystery writer!

I must confess to having no idea what the title or the presence of the ghosts of those Confederate dead are doing in the book, but it didn’t matter. The ending was satisfying as the really bad guys were dead and Dave and Rosie were not. Eager to read another Burke novel.