A bullet through a windowpane brings Robicheaux back in contact with the Sonnier family, childhood friends whose morality is scarred by a history of abuse. Welton, once a pilot for the CIA-backed Air America; Lyle, a television evangelist; and Drew, a girl-woman with a bitter past, form an extraordinarily close-knit family whose guarded secrets make it impossible for Robicheaux to protect them.

A conversation between Robicheaux and a dying childhood friend about Ida Durbin, a young prostitute that Robicheaux's half-brother, Jimmie, loved and lost in the late 1950s, sets the ex-homicide detective on a path that eventually leads to several gruesome killings and his near downfall. Unemployed, his wife dead, his daughter in college, Robicheaux rejoins the New Iberia, La., sheriff's department at the urging of Sheriff Helen Soileau, who needs...

Robicheaux has lived through much inner turmoil and seen too much of man's dark side to believe that there are any surprises left for him in this world. But then the devastation brought by Hurruicane Katrina seems to make a wreck of his sould even as it pummels New Orleans. In the aftermath, two black men are murdered in the ninth ward--and Robicheaux refuses to allow another injustice to pile more misery on the survivors of this deadly storm.

James Lee Burke's eagerly awaited new novel finds Detective Dave Robicheaux back in New Iberia, Louisiana, and embroiled in the most harrowing and dangerous case of his career. 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...

Police detective Dave Robicheaux faces off with the most diabolical villain he has ever faced in the twentieth installment of the Dave Robicheaux series. Sadistic serial killer Asa Surette avoids the death penalty for murders he committed while capital punishment was banned. But when Robicheaux's daughter Alafair writes a series of articles implicating Surrette in other murders which could get him death, he decides to escape prison and make her pay....

Detective Dave Robicheaux's world isn't filled with too many happy stories, but Desmond Cormier's rags-to-riches tale is certainly one of them. Robicheaux first met Cormier on the streets of New Orleans, when the young, undersized boy had foolish dreams of becoming a Hollywood director. Twenty-five years later, when Robicheaux knocks on Cormier's door, it isn't to congratulate him on his Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations. Robicheaux has discovered...