This Edgar-winning 3rd installment in James Lee Burke's "Dave Robichaux" series. Enemies have already come after Dave and murdered his wife Annie. Now a new threat appears when an old friend confides in Dave that he overheard talk of a murder. This time the bad guys, who work in the oil lease business in Montana, are threatening his adopted daughter, Alafair. Dave goes after them and leaves them beaten but alive. One of the men kills the other and makes it look as though Dave is the killer. Now Dave must travel to Montana with Alafair in tow to clear him name or end up in Angola prison. While Kirkus is once again less than laudatory of Burke's writing style, they still conclude that "Burke tells an evocative and compelling story of a good man's struggle with the vigilante inside him."
Publishers Weekly is more favorable, opening their review by saying "Burke pits a land-hungry oil company against a Blackfeet Indian reservation in a stunning novel that takes detective fiction into new imaginative realms.." and they continue "Robicheaux's dogged investigation...sets him on a collision course with Mafia thugs and oil interests...All the main characters in this darkly beautiful, lyric saga carry heavy emotional baggage, and Robicheaux's sleuthing is a simultaneous exorcism of demons of grief, loss, fear, rage, vengeance. Burke's fictional terrain--stretching from the Louisiana bayous to Montana's red cliffs and pine-dotted hills--is uniquely his own, yet also a microcosm of a multi-ethnic America. He writes from the heart and the gut."
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