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A dying sadist calls in Dave Robicheaux and he is on the trail of a woman he and his half-brother, Jimmie, knew back in 1958 and her abusers. A serial killer has also surfaced in Baton Rouge and Robicheaux is deputised to find him. It's not long before his old oppo, Clete Purcel, is in on the act.

Burke excels himself in the poetic portrayal of the atmosphere and location as in the intriguing character cast: the old patriarch Raphael Chalons, his strange daughter, Honoria, and TV journalist son, Val, among them. 1958 seems to have been a watershed year on both sides of the Atlantic, when significant yet unseen changes were at work. In Britain it saw the rundown of the merchant navy, and the end of steam railways and manual telephone exchanges. Robicheaux comes to realise that some people were 'no longer symbols or milestones out of Jimmie's and my adolescent experience. Nor were they simple foils to the innocence of the postwar era in which we had grown up.' They were emissaries of organised crime in the here and now. Robicheaux thinks, 'In the state of Louisiana, systematic venality is a given. The state's culture, mind-set, religious attitudes and economics are no different from those of a Caribbean nation. The person who believes he can rise to a position of wealth and power in the state of Louisiana and not do business with the devil probably knows nothing about the devil and even less about Louisiana.' This is good, but what many Burke fans will be waiting for now is a post-Katrina book. That should be very good indeed.